Fitted with a high gear, several tractors were specially adapted for inspection purposes; in short, the extent of the ubiquitous utility, and of the universal popularity of these remarkable little machines, may be gauged by the fact that their appearance was welcomed on fronts as divergent as were those of France, Macedonia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. CHAPTER VIII "HULLO! AMERICA" "A world where nothing is had for nothing." CLOUGH. In the summer of 1917, at the urgent request of the Railway Executive Committee, Mr. Cooke, in conjunction with Sir Francis Dent and Mr. A. J. Hill, chief mechanical engineer G.E.R., undertook, personally, a "mission" to the Government of the U.S. of America, as representing the unprecedented straits to which the leading railway companies of Great Britain had become reduced, and for the purpose of enlisting the practical sympathy of the great republic of the Western hemisphere, at that time but recently united to the allied cause. Doubts were indeed entertained originally as to whether America could in fact supply material to England in view of her own entry into the arena of European conflict, and so in view of her own requirements; consequently, as will be seen from the following briefly stated remarks, the outcome of the "mission" proved to be eminently satisfactory, and this in no small measure due to the friendly intervention of the U.S. Advisory Committee, acting throughout, primarily, in the interests of the British as opposed to those of individual American railway companies. A few cogent reasons may plausibly be advanced to account for the _impasse_ to which the British railways had been brought. One cannot fail, for instance, to recall the stigma which, in the pre-war and piping times of peace, invariably attached to the despised 1s. a day man of the British fighting forces; but although, as in Kipling's immortal stanza, it was-- "Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Chuck him out, the brute," all this sort of antiquated "flap-doodle" very shortly underwent a complete "right-about-turn," when the great ordeal came to be faced, and very speedily it became a case of-- "Please to step in front, Sir, When the guns began to shoot."