There was another difficulty to be overcome in the way of finding all sorts of materials. Here, again, the powers that be did not hesitate to commandeer where more usual methods could not prevail. The Ministry inspectors and engineers apparently know what every firm in the country is busy about, and they simply reported where anything specially required was to be found. Thus and so, some corrugated-iron sheds and huts in course of construction on contract and destined for some places at the other ends of the earth find themselves hastily transported to Somewhere in Britain and hurriedly erected there instead of at Sumatra or Zanzibar. The buildings required some converting and altering perhaps to adapt them to use in a chilly, damp-laden country instead of under tropical skies, but such difficulties are very minor ones to the men who are running this job. There have been and still are greater ones that are constantly being surmounted. There were fewer in the summer months perhaps, but in the frost and rain of a cold and wet winter all the canons of carpentering, masonry, and building construction have been flouted and set aside. Any builder will tell you how impossible it is, for instance, to lay concrete in frosty weather. As a rule the builder may not have descended to details of the why and the wherefore, but here the causes were sought, found, and overcome. When it was necessary the water for mixing the concrete was heated and the stones were warmed, and when the concrete was spread it was carefully covered with straw or cinders or anything that would keep the frost off it. Sometimes a roof would be run up to keep off the rain, a temporary break-wind wall erected to hold out the winds, blazing fires lit in braziers to fight off the frost, so that mortar might be mixed and brick walls built. Building work, it has always been understood, must cease when the winter sets in. Here nothing ceases, everything drives ahead at high-pressure speed. The whole of the area is still more or less under construction, more or less completed. In some parts rows of huts and houses stand practically ready for occupation; in others the work is in its first stages, and the ground is one weltering chaos of heaped earth and rough holes, up-torn turf, piled planks, bricks, mortar, and building material. Swarms of men hammer and hew and dig and burrow amidst the confusion; perky, self-important-looking little “pug” engines puff and pant and haul their trailing strings of wagons amongst the earth heaps and holes, round and between the lumber and the foundations and frames of unerected buildings.