Now, there is nothing quite so second-hand as second-hand building materials. Boards are full of nail holes and sometimes covered with faded paint or disfiguring marks. Bricks are soiled, chipped, and worn, and conglomerated with stonelike mortar. Hardware and metallic fixtures are corroded and rusty. Such materials are not only wreckage and junk, but not even valuable junk. The chief cost in the construction of a training camp was the labor which laid the brick, installed the underground piping, smoothed, squared, and nailed up the lumber, and soldered the joints in the plumbing. All that labor value was lost when camps were salvaged for their materials. Yet this was not the only loss which the Government was forced to sustain. Practically all the camps were originally located on leased ground; and this fact implied that in razing the camps the Government was bound to restore the land to its original condition, or, in lieu of that, to pay to the owners the costs of restoration. These questions of property damage greatly complicated the demobilization of the training camps, because the amounts of damage were so hard to ascertain. Concrete roads had been laid across what were originally pastures; fertile corn lands were crisscrossed with clay ridges thrown up above the water and sewer trenches. On the other hand, some of the camp improvements had drained former swamps and reclaimed them for cultivation, and such benefits would offset damages in other places. It was out of the question for the Government to attempt to settle these thousands of cases individually, because of the time it would take; and therefore it was stipulated that the purchasers of the camps must assume all liabilities for property damage and hold the Government harmless from claims that might later be pressed in the Court of Claims. Naturally the purchasers made allowances for these damages in their bids, and wide allowances, too, since the extent of the damages was largely conjecture. This consideration further depressed the prices paid by the purchasers.