The club house is the centre of the social and ceremonial life of the camp, for balls, dinners, receptions, conferences, concerts without number; and it has been the scene of a military wedding—­the daughter of a major-general to the grandson of an ex-president.  To these events the unassuming, but pervasive beauty of the place lends a dignity new to our social life.  In our army camps social life is truly democratic, as any one who has experienced it does not need to be told.  Not alone have the conditions of conscription conspired to make it so, but there is a manifest will-to-democracy—­the growing of a new flower of the spirit, sown in a community of sacrifice, to reach its maturity, perhaps, only in a community of suffering.

The author may seem to have over-praised this Community Club House; with the whole country to draw from for examples it may well appear fatuous to concentrate the reader’s attention, for so long, on a building in a remote part of the Middle West:  cheap, temporary, and requiring only twenty-one days for its erection.  But of the transvaluation of values brought about by the war, this building is an eminent example:  it stands in symbolic relation to the times; it represents what may be called the architecture of Service; it is among the first of the new temples of the new democracy, dedicated to the uses of simple, rational social life.  Notwithstanding that it fills a felt need, common to every community, there is nothing like it in any of our towns and cities; there are only such poor and partial substitutes as the hotel, the saloon, the dance hall, the lodge room and the club.  It is scarcely conceivable that the men and women who have experienced its benefits and its beauty should not demand and have similar buildings in their own home towns.

[Illustration:  PLATE VII.  INTERIOR OF THE CAMP SHERMAN COMMUNITY HOUSE]

Beyond the oasis of the Community Club House at Camp Sherman stretch the cantonments—­a Euclidian nightmare of bare boards, black roofs and ditches, making grim vistas of straight lines.  This is the architecture of Need in contradistinction to the architecture of Greed, symbolized in the shop-window prettiness of those sanitary suburbs of our cities created by the real estate agent and the speculative builder.  Neither contain any enduring element of beauty.

But the love of beauty in one form or another exists in every human heart, and if too long or too rigorously denied it finds its own channels of fulfilment.  This desire for self-expression through beauty is an important, though little remarked phenomenon of these mid-war times.  At the camps it shows itself in the efforts of men of specialized tastes and talents to get together and form dramatic organizations, glee clubs, and orchestras; and more generally by the disposition of the soldiers to sing together at work and play and on the march.  The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsion against the prevailing