seem.

That field in which the tanks manoeuvre is characteristic of the whole of
this district of levelled villages and vanished woods. Imagine a
continuous clay vacant lot in one of our Middle Western cities on the
rainiest day you can recall; and further imagine, on this limitless lot,
a network of narrow-gauge tracks and wagon roads, a scattering of
contractors' shanties, and you will have some idea of the daily life and
surroundings of one of oar American engineer regiments, which is running
a railroad behind the British front. Yet one has only to see these men
and talk with them to be convinced of the truth that human happiness and
even human health thanks to modern science--are not dependent upon an
existence in a Garden of Eden. I do not mean exactly that these men
would choose to spend the rest of their existences in this waste, but
they are happy in the consciousness of a job well done. It was really
inspiring to encounter here the familiar conductors and brakemen,
engineers and firemen, who had voluntarily, and for an ideal, left their
homes in a remote and peaceful republic three thousand miles away, to
find contentment and a new vitality, a wider vision, in the difficult and
dangerous task they were performing. They were frequently under fire
--when they brought back the wounded or fetched car-loads of munitions to
the great guns on the ridiculous little trains of flat cars with
open-work wheels, which they named--with American humour--the Federal
Express and the Twentieth Century Limited. And their officers were
equally happy. Their colonel, of our regular Army Engineer Corps, was
one of those broad-shouldered six-footers who, when they walk the streets
of Paris, compel pedestrians to turn admiringly and give one a new pride
in the manhood of our nation. Hospitably he drew us out of the wind and
rain into his little hut, and sat us down beside the stove, cheerfully
informing us that, only the night before, the gale had blown his door in,