The village of Vilosnes on the Meuse, halfway between Verdun and Stenay, suffered its first serious damage in October and November, 1918, when the Americans made their flank attack through this region. By the end of the first year some half of the residences were repaired sufficiently so that each had a few habitable rooms. But by January, 1920, not a single building site had been cleared up in the villages immediately around Verdun. Extensive barracks for the civilian authorities and war prisoners had been built, and a few families of returning refugees had been provided with cabins. The returning population lived a miserable existence. Difficulty was experienced in procuring them even the simplest rations, and the most necessary clothing. Naturally there were no stores and shops left. Big motor trucks belonging to the American Red Cross circulated through the country, distributing either gratuitously or at low prices such necessaries as canned goods, clothing, tobacco, and toys. This bounty produced such joy among the destitute refugees that I was reminded of a German Christmastide. At Charny, near Verdun, the AngloAmerican Red Cross established a market where necessaries were sold. Titled English ladies ran the place, 10 and

on market days women came with great baskets, even from remote villages, to make necessary purchases.

The electric power house at Vilosnes lay in a sheltered spot and suffered but little during the war. It might easily have been put in working order in a couple of months, and would have been a great help in our reconstruction work. However, nothing was done, and a year after the armistice it was in the VOL. 20-NO. 994

same condition as when the last shot was fired. Great quantities of doors, windows, and simple articles of furniture were called for. The economy of standardizing these seemed perfectly obvious. However, nothing of that kind was attempted. Every door, doorframe, window, and table, was built to different measurements. The government offices were filled with model regulations for doing things, but they remained a dead letter, partly because the officials thought they were too busy even to read them. In addition, many of the officials and employees were entirely unqualified for their tasks.

Immense supplies of every kind, left behind by the Germans, were frivolously wasted. In the former German reserve positions, and in their timber camps and engineers' equipment stations, there were vast quantities of the very materials and articles required for clearing up the country and rebuilding its ruins. These were left to take care of themselves. Any one stole what he wanted. What a blessing it would have been had these things been distributed fairly to the civilian population!

Our German prisoners would advise, and even show by their own example, what good use could be made of these supplies. My own company was assigned to some ruined barracks which were in a most distressing condition. The building did not contain a single convenience. For three days we had nothing but our blankets and field rations. When we left this camp it consisted of a row of fine wooden houses, with double walls and roofs, and hot and cold baths. Every room. was habitable; there was a wellequipped shoe shop and tailor shop, and a model kitchen. Everything we used in reconstructing the place was taken from a German timber camp in the immediate vicinity. Even the

medicines in our dispensary, the tailor's sewing machine, the knives and forks, the coffee grinder, and the plumbing materials for the bath house, were brought on the shoulders of our prisoners without any French assistance. The interior of the buildings was made homelike by bouquets of field flowers in vases made from cartridge shells. We burned as fuel fine construction timber, such as heavy studding, beams, and new railway ties.

The hardest problem to solve in the devastated region is that of labor. The French employed everyone who applied, and the confusion of tongues could not have been greater at the Tower of Babel than it was in some of the reconstruction districts. Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Greeks jostled each other. Hordes of Spanish and Italian laborers settled down in any former German camp, and formed a sort of colony. Labor companies from Morocco were employed and kept under military discipline. Black, yellow, and brown soldiers discharged from the French army, and nondescript civilians loafed about. Sly Chinamen and smiling Japanese were on the job. Naturally, also, great numbers of French laborers flocked here from all parts of the country. However, whatever their tongue and their color, these workers possessed one characteristic in common. They did as little as possible for as much money as possible. I was once walking along the railway between Verdun and Stenay when I observed some three hundred French and Indo-Chinese laborers, who were supposed to be ballasting the line. They arrived on a train at nine o'clock in the morning, and left for their camp at three in the afternoon. I watched them for a full hour. During that period there were never more than four or five men out of the three hundred at work at any one time. The foremen

rolled cigarettes and chatted. In fact, the only people who really did an honest day's work were the German war prisoners, who were grouped into labor companies of four or five hundred, and probably numbered four hundred and fifty thousand in the entire devastated region.

It seemed to me that employment conditions for civilian laborers were excellent, and I am unable to understand why German workingmen should show such aversion to seeking work in this region. Civilian workers are housed in barracks, and every two or three have a separate room. They are provided with three meals a day. Breakfast consists of black coffee with sugar and white bread; the midday meal of soup, meat, green vegetables, potatoes, and stewed fruit; the evening meal is generally the same as the noon meal except that soup is omitted. For three meals and lodgings the civilian wage earner paid, in the second half of 1919, from four to seven francs, according to the district in which he worked. At that time a skilled mechanic averaged at least twenty francs a day. All in all, an industrious worker could easily lay aside sixty francs a week. Even unskilled laborers seldom received less than twenty francs a day, and, as I have already said, they were not expected to work very hard.

Naturally, the crowding together of hundreds of thousands of Europeans, Africans, and Asiatics, of all tongues and nationalities, makes plenty of work for the police. Riots between laborers of different nationalities are frequent. The still sparse civilian population is more or less terrorized, especially by the Asiatics.

We German war prisoners were under the military administration, except that our labor was supervised by the civilian officials. Instead of cooperating cordially, the military and

civilian officers were generally at sword's points. Officers used to ridicule the civilian authorities in conversation with me, while the civilian authorities, when they had a chance, would take no pains to conceal from me their dislike and contempt for the military authorities. The latter issued their orders without any regard whatever for the needs of the civil government. When our labor company, No. 453, had been employed for seven months at Vilosnes, and had become thoroughly familiar with the ground and local needs, it was abruptly removed without any apparent reason and replaced by a company of Hungarian war prisoners; although the civilian officials of the district made every effort in their power to keep the Germans, with whom they

were by this time well acquainted. The army officers would arbitrarily detail a hundred men or more to a place where they were not wanted, at a time when they were urgently needed by the civilian authorities at another point. In general, the army never ceased to regard the prisoners as they did soldiers, to be ordered about capriciously, without any consideration for their service as workers. Carpenters, saddlers, and other skilled mechanics among the prisoners were kept constantly employed making furniture and other articles for the private use of French officers. When the latter were transferred to a new point or demobilized they took the furniture away with them; and their successors were constantly ordering new things made.

tors, and consequently they can defend such industries by prohibitive protective tariffs.

However, in order to make the most of this natural wealth, to utilize this enormous amount of raw materials, it is necessary to have abundant labor. The United States have always been in quest of labor; in the past importing black slaves, and later inviting European immigrants. To-day there are no more slaves. Americans dislike all colors except white, discouraging even Asiatic immigration. In view of their present negro problem they would regard the further importation of blacks criminal folly. And European immi

grants are becoming scarcer. Therefore, the problem of getting labor is becoming every day more acute.

Indeed, many pre-war immigrants are going home with no intention of returning. It is expected that one million. will leave during 1920. The explanation for their departure is the formation of new states, such as Bohemia or Poland, the liberation of Italian, Serbian, or Roumanian irridenta, and the expropriation in these countries of the great land owners, a condition which permits the old emigrants to buy farms at home, with so great a profit from the high exchange value of the dollars they saved in America, when converted into the currency of their own country, that the poorest laborer from Poland or Bohemia can become a great landed proprietor when he returns to the land of his birth. These emigrants will leave the United States, to which they came only to make money, and they are wise to do so. They will be much happier, more respected, and more influential at home than in America.

But does one realize what difficulties this incessant emigration causes American industry? The American laborer already has the habit of changing his job whenever he likes. As soon as he thinks there is the least advantage in taking up a new situation or trade, he leaves his old one on pay day without notifying his employer, or showing the slightest concern for the results of his caprice.*

As a consequence there are very few highly skilled native workmen in the United States. But what shall we say of a flux like the present, when in the spring of 1920 at Pittsburgh, the iron and steel metropolis of America, three

*If one wishes to see a lively and amusing description of these incoherent migrations of the European immigrants in the United States, one should read the very accurate and vivid work of Jean Farmer, César Napoléon Gaillard à la conquête de l'Amerique, published by Payot.

thousand workmen leave the city's workshops every week, forcing employers constantly to engage unskilled men entirely ignorant of their new trade?

If we add to this the incessant strikes, natural in a country where one thinks of his job only as a means of making money, we can see that American factories as well as farms are far from producing their maximum capacity. Nevertheless, the fact remains, and everybody knows it, that the United States at present exports much more than it imports; that the country in general grew rich while most other belligerent countries grew poor, and that it is perhaps easier for an individual to make a good living there, and even to acquire wealth if he has luck and is thrifty, than in Europe. Finally, this country, in spite of the scarcity of labor and rising wages, is prospering and progressing.

One of the American problems arising from immigration, a problem to which the war and the subsequent convulsions have given considerable importance, is that of 'Americanizing' or if you like nationalizing, or absorbing and assimilating, these numerous immigrants from the four corners of Europe. Evidently a state should possess citizens who feel themselves attached to the country, to the national community, and to their fellow citizens, by common ties, sentiments, thoughts, and habits, by a common ideal and a common interest. I do not mention traditions, because in this case the traditions are lacking. How can the peasant from Slovakia, the Pole, the Neapolitan, the Piedmontese, the Greek, the Pomeranian, the East Prussian, the Kishineff Jew, the Irish Catholic, the Breton, the French Canadian, and the Scotch Protestant understand, appreciate each other, or think along the same lines?