Omer, with its beautiful church and little blue chateau, past the
rest-camps of the big regiments of guards to a seaport on the downs,
formerly a quiet little French town, transformed now into an ordered
Babel. The term is paradoxical, but I let it stand. English, Irish, and
Scotch from the British Isles and the ends of the earth mingle there with
Indians, Egyptians, and the chattering Mongolians in queer fur caps who
work in the bakeries.

I went through one of these bakeries, almost as large as an automobile
factory, fragrant with the aroma of two hundred thousand loaves of bread.
This bakery alone sends every day to the trenches two hundred thousand
loaves made from the wheat of western Canada! Of all sights to be seen
in this place, however, the reclamation "plant" is the most wonderful.
It covers acres. Everything which is broken in war, from a pair of
officer's field-glasses to a nine-inch howitzer carriage is mended here
--if it can be mended. Here, when a battle-field is cleared, every article
that can possibly be used again is brought; and the manager pointed with
pride to the furnaces in his power-house, which formerly burned coal and
now are fed with refuse--broken wheels of gun-carriages, sawdust, and
even old shoes. Hundreds of French girls and even German prisoners are
resoling and patching shoes with the aid of American machinery, and even
the uppers of such as are otherwise hopeless are cut in spirals into
laces. Tunics, breeches, and overcoats are mended by tailors; rusty camp
cookers are retinned, and in the foundries the precious scraps of cast
iron are melted into braziers to keep Tommy in the trenches warm. In the
machine-shops the injured guns and cannon are repaired. German prisoners
are working there, too. At a distance, in their homely grey tunics, with
their bullet-shaped heads close-cropped and the hairs standing out like
the needles of a cylinder of a music-box, they had the appearance of hard
citizens who had become rather sullen convicts. Some wore spectacles. A