A

STEELE

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-Built
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STEELE structure is complete. It is not just a factory of four walls and a roof fabricated to meet a present emergency, but a comprehensive industrial plant in which every detail of design, construction and mechanical equipment is worked out along the individual lines which the particular business in question requires-built right for all time.

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is to centralize control in one organizationto take from the busy executive all the care and worriment attendant upon that method of construction which divides responsibility between the architect and the various contractors.

Such service is possible only because of the size, completeness and 64 years' experience of the STEELE organization.

American boys to lie in by the Marne, the old barrier between hordes and individuals. This camping- and scouting-party of mine had its lunch on the high ramparts of the château at Château-Thierry. Our soldier-chauffeur called it "Chatto Tear-y," and that is the favorite way to say it in our Army. But don't you laugh at our boy. He speaks French with a khaki accent, but it was he who told me the history of this eleventh century château and how it was ruined in a war many decades before this one. I don't know where he browsed for his history, but he was not camping in a ruin he knew nothing about, as the rest of us were. The more hurrah for him.

The mossy, tree-grown ruins are on a height, and as we ate the only food we had been able to buy in Meaux-that is, tinned meat, a loaf of straw bread, and a bottle of aristocratic wine (an unkindly mess) we looked down on the town and across the Marne to the south bank. It was only three and a half weeks since the Boche had left. So we had already gained half a week on him since Belleau.

The town below was much shelled, but still it remains a recognizable place. Dust rises out of it as we look down, and a roar of traffic. Its streets are pasted up with board signs, newly written in American. You can tell whose signs they are by the stark brevity of the directions. No words wasted. Old curbstones are down and war-wagons almost bunk against the little flowery statue of the harvest girl. She still stands there timidly in the midst of all the wreckage and dust.

The château ruins are in a depressing mess with dirty German leavings. The ancient dungeons beneath the walls made good shelters and these are full of signs of recent occupation. We struck a match in one of them and it was so damp that the poor flame swallowed hard and expired. But not before we had seen a few things. A very old and very huge stone cross loomed out of the blackness. Nothing on it but scribbled German script. There was a magnificent red-plush chair at its feet, evidently brought from some luxurious home in the town, and there was the broken neck of a violin, and some straw beds and cans and mud and junk. Oh, but this is a dirty war!

Above, among the ruins, were graves, German, and some nice furniture for sitting outdoors and enjoying the view of the town. One fine, hand-made carved chair had been rained on and the mud splashed up the legs. What does anything matter?

As the party, after gathering up their own unopened tins and bottles, "hit the trail" again, they heard an unfamiliar sound in the air. From other sources we have learned that the roar of the Liberty motor is easily distinguishable from the sound of any other aero engine at the front.

But we anticipate the joyous revelation that came to that party of correspondents and soldiers there beside the Marne:

What was it, where was it? It was a general roar, vague, frightening. You couldn't locate it and couldn't recognize it. It was in the air. It must be up in the air. It was getting suddenly much louder. "I say, can it be a plane?"

The roar filled the whole heavens. Far up between the leaves of the trees we strained our eyes and there! there were two specks. We turned and looked at each other, a dawning question in our eyes. Could it be possible? A low voice at our elbow said:

"They're Liberty planes."

"Isaiah! Our planes! They've come!" The strange new sound grew to a climax, passed, faded, died away. It was over in three minutes, and the tender sky up toward the front had swallowed them.

Like people who had seen a vision and heard the words of the prophet on the mount, we turned and went down the path without a word. We faced the same direction and followed in the imagined shadow of our planes.

Now we were on the broad highway to the front. This is the famous route from Château-Thierry to Fere-en-Tardenois. Along this road the German masses were struggling only three weeks ago to get out of the Marne pocket. French and Americans at the left, and French, Italians, and British to the right were squeezing in ahead to cut them off. French and Americans behind were chasing after them. French and American planes were hovering overhead and bombs were splashing down from them. Every little while several of our fliers swooped down and reeled off a belt of machine-gun bullets into them. No wonder the road is still bordered with broken stuff and dotted with German crosses stuck in the ground haphazard, turned over, and tossed about at fantastic angles as tho halted in a marionette dance.

A little farther back, neglected and halftrodden harvests were being hastily gathered in by French soldiers. Up here, and from here on, nothing in the fields but shellholes, big and little.

A few refugees mingled on the roads with troops this day, sturdy pioneers coming back to their homes. Some very few had a horse and wagon to bring them home, but that is heaped-up luxury. Most of them were walking, staggering along under a big bundle. That bundle in most cases represented all they had now to start life with again. The villages on the highroad to Fère are all badly damaged and empty except for soldiers bivouacking in the ruins. Little Vaux is a complete chaos, and the only living people in it are three old women, one old man, a cat, and a very sporty kitten who was cold-bloodedly playing with a piece of débris as I passed.

We hear so much of ruined villages that it seems as tho we get to feel that the French people must be used by now to living in them. However, it is the first experience for all of these people, and there are few harder experiences for any one to have to face. It is not as bad now, either, as it will be in a couple of months, when it turns cold and begins to rain. Now we ran into Fère-en-Tardenois, and I, for one, shall always think of that place as the Inferno. To some people it was once home, and to the Germans only a week before it was a big base for their Paris armies. They had miles of ammunition and stores there and thereabout, and some say they had 600 cannon in active batteries in the vicinity.

We shelled them out of it, and we bombed them with terrible tornadoes of air-bombs dropt by great squadrons of planes roaring down out of the clouds. The little town is an awful jumble. The houses look as tho they had not only been hit by shells that wrecked them through to the bottom, but as tho their débris had been hit again and tossed far away, so that perhaps the junk of one house now lies in the cellar of a neighboring one.

In all the woods about the town the Germans had well-built sheds and vast stores of boxes, grenades, and shells. Our bombs stormed down among this sinister pile and up they went, and the woods with

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them. Some charred pines and the black ground mark the site of this great treehidden store that no doubt was destined in one way or another for Paris. What our bombs did not explode, the Germans in retreating pell-mell tried to finish. But there was too much of it even for lightning destruction to engulf.

A famous American division, already celebrated in spite of its few months of action, passed along the road. The faces, seen in glimpses through the dust, were red and streaming with sweat, but they were a "contented-looking lot," notes the correspondent, and many of them were "jollying." He writes of them:.

These were the boys who had led the American vanguard to the Vesle. We tossed remarks to them and they roared back good cheer.

The little streets were encumbered with fallen ruins, and hundreds of French and Americans were salving, clearing, pulling down, and piling back the rubbish. Plaster powder was flying.

Signal-corps men on ladders were leading telephone-wires through the town high along the ruined walls and across the chaotic square. Others were hammering up new signs marking directions and telling where certain quarters were. Often the American signs were beside the recent German ones, which were still there in fresh paint. And those German sign-boards were nailed over or beside the original French ones. Kaleidoscopic! We shot past the dread word "Kommandantur" stretching across a wreck of a building on which the faint word "Mairie" (town hall) was just visible.

All of this was only the furious background. The thing that riveted attention was in the foreground. It was a camion train that had started through the town on its way forward. It was carrying a whole division of husky young Americans up into the battle just ahead. We were going in the same direction and we tried to pass, but it was a "two-direction street," and cars and trucks were coming steadily down from the front, too. We worried our way along, shooting ahead, now darting in behind a big lorry, then on again.

The train came thundering on, and the road-bed shook with the weight of it. The camions were big French ones, blue, with prairie-wagon tops, each one packed with about twenty-five American boys standing or sitting, and driven by-whom do you think?-Chinese drivers. It's a strange war!

I think I spent four hours on the road with that forward-urging stream. I have but little idea what the countryside was like beyond Fère toward Fismes, because I could see nothing. It would be hard for the imagination to picture the dust that surrounds a train of two or three thousand camions bowling along a dry road. The first one kicks up an ordinary cloud. The following ones make that fly and add theirs to it. The next group whirls this wide of the road and thickens the air with its contribution. Soon the road is lost. You can no longer see it or anything on it. If you are on it yourself you make out nearby outlines uncertainly. The rest of the world has disappeared. You are crawling along the bottom of a dry sea which floats and swims about you. Your eyes look like burned holes, and the dust hangs like hoarfrost to skin, hair, clothing.

I shall never forget the roar of the oncoming thousands of lorries, nor the glimpses I got of those Chinese faces at the wheel, their blue helmets pushed back,

their mouths and eyes twisted into uncanny grimaces as they strained forward peering into the dust. Some of them looked horrified like Peking demons, but they passed with relentless certainty of grip and with unchanging expression. They gave one an impression of sureness, faithfulness.

Our own boys, seen vaguely in this huge blur, look oddly familiar, yet strangely grotesque. In the blazing heat their faces were streaming, and on their damp cheeks and noses the yellow dust was caked like a mask.

The lowering sun was getting red and turning the whole dust sea coppery. I watched our lads' faces in that light as they glided by. They looked serious, firm. I remembered something a Frenchman had said to me a few days before: "Your boys more than any others of us keep thinking that they are fighting for an ideal." It seemed true of those grave young faces that I saw fitfully through the dust, thousands of them passing on to go into the battle.

Then later, right up near the field of action, I saw them dismount from the lorries. It was dusk. The road wound away back over the hills, and faintly in the gathering darkness you could see the train winding out like a serpent. The men formed beside the road, silently, without lights. The Red Cross companies marched away first to get their equipment set up in some concealed place. After that, the others. A curt word of command and they fell into companies; another, and they strode off, over the crest of the hill and toward the line.

There was just light enough left for us to prowl up a bare hillside to a clump of trees at the top. Up in these regions no faintest glimmer of light can be used at night. We crossed an open field cautiously, plunged into an unseen shell-hole, and finally gained the crest. We groped our way through the wood to the front facing the east, and there we commanded a wide view of the Vesle Valley about Fismes.

When we spoke to our soldier about Fismes, he looked puzzled.

Feem?" he asked.

We spelled it.

"Oh, Fizzums," he said. Our men entered that this morning.

That is where we are fighting now, and that was whither our new division was hiking.

The night's gun-fire was already rumbling as we sat down in the dark around what felt like a log and had our evening feasta feast that was entirely unseen, maneuvered only by the twin senses of feeling and taste.

What was around us? We did not know. It was only a few days since the Germans had held this ground we were on now.

All through the night we watched the barrage and followed the battle as it illumined the sky. Overhead we heard German airplanes buzzing. Down the hill in some hidden bivouac that must have been of large proportions we heard the gas-alarm and the raid-alarm given at intervals.

Like fool Americans, true to type, we listened to the gas-alarm without taking it personally. Our masks we had left in the car on the edge of the wood. Luckily for us no gas came our way, and the raiders wasted no bombs on us. We were absorbed watching the east. It flared with lights. Strings of star-shells and flash of guns between them made the night gorgeous, if hideous. We had heard of some wondrous new red light that was being used to illuminate the battle-field, and at about