them serenely across No Man’s Land and into the German trenches.  He had been expecting us, and led me along a duck board over the morass, to where one of these leviathans was awaiting us.  You crawl through a greasy hole in the bottom, and the inside is as full of machinery as the turret of the Pennsylvania, and you grope your way to the seat in front beside that of the captain and conductor, looking out through a slot in the armour over a waste of water and mud.  From here you are supposed to operate a machine gun.  Behind you two mechanics have started the engines with a deafening roar, above which are heard the hoarse commands of the captain as he grinds in his gears.  Then you realize that the thing is actually moving, that the bosses on the belt have managed to find a grip on the slime—­and presently you come to the brink of what appears, to your exaggerated sense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with distant steep banks on the farther side that look unattainable and insurmountable.  It is an old German trench which the rains have worn and widened.  You brace yourself, you grip desperately a pair of brass handles in front of you, while leviathan hesitates, seems to sit up on his haunches, and then gently buries his nose in the pasty clay and paws his way upward into the field beyond.  It was like sitting in a huge rocking-chair.  That we might have had a bump, and a bone-breaking one, I was informed after I had left the scene of the adventure.  It all depends upon the skill of the driver.  The monsters are not as tractable as they 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