"But it's good enough to last four years."

This was America in France in every sense of the word. One felt the
atmosphere of rush. In the buildings, which should have been left when
materials failed, but which had been carried to completion by pioneer
methods, one recognised the resourcefulness of the lumberman of the
West. Then came a touch of Eastern America, to me almost more replete
with memory and excitement. In a flash I was transferred from a camp
in France to the rock-hewn highway of Fifth Avenue, running through
groves of sky-scrapers, garnished with sunshine and echoing with
tripping footsteps. I could smell the asphalt soaked with gasolene
and the flowers worn by the passing girls. The whole movement and
quickness of the life I had lost flooded back on me. The sound I heard
was the fate _motif_ of the frantic opera of American endeavour. The
truly wonderful thing was that I should hear it here, in a woodland in
France--the rapid tapping of a steel-riveter at work.

I learnt afterwards that I was not the only one to be carried away by
that music, as of a monstrous wood-pecker in an iron forest. The first
day the riveter was employed, the whole camp made excuses to come
and listen to it. They stood round it in groups, deafened and
thrilled--and a little homesick. What the bag-pipe is to the
Scotchman, the steel-riveter is to the American--the instrument which
best expresses his soul to a world which is different.

I found that the riveter was being employed in the erection of an
immense steel and concrete refrigerating plant, which was to
have machinery for the production of its own ice and sufficient
meat-storage capacity to provide a million men for thirty days. The
water for the ice was being obtained from wells which had been already