of aeroplanes, which would employ twenty thousand men.

I arrived there at night. There was no town. One stepped from the
train into the open country. Far away in the distance there was a
glimmering of fires and the scarlet of sparks shooting up between
bare tree-tops. My first impression was of the fragrance of pines and,
after that, as I approached the huts, of a memory more definite and
elusively familiar. The swinging of lanterns helped to bring it back:
I was remembering lumber-camps in the Rocky Mountains. The box-stove
in the shack in which I slept that night and the roughly timbered
walls served to heighten the illusion that I was in America. Next
morning the illusion was completed. Here were men with mackinaws and
green elk boots; here were cook-houses in which the only difference
was that a soldier did the cooking instead of a Chinaman; and above
all, here were fir and pines growing out of a golden soil, with a
soft wind blowing overhead. And here, in an extraordinary way, the
democracy of a lumber-camp had been reproduced: every one from
the Colonel down was a worker; it was difficult, apart from their
efficiency, to tell their rank.

Early in the morning I started out on a gasolene-speeder to make the
tour. At an astonishing rate, for the work had only been in hand three
months, the vast acreage was being tracked and covered with the sheds.
The sheds were not the kind I had been used to on my own front; they
were built out of anything that came handy, commenced with one sort of
material and finished with another. Sometimes the cross-pieces in the
roofs were still sweating, proving that it was only yesterday they
had been cut down in the nearby wood. There was no look of permanence
about anything. As the officer who conducted me said, "It's all run
up--a race against time." And then he added with a twinkle in his eye,