There was one consolation in this interminable lingering amid the spring muds and rains of Virginia. Duties were light, and there were a hundred and fifty cavalry horses in the stables, needing exercise. Sometimes we went out on the drill-ground and were taught tricks by an old cavalry officer; or hurdles were set up and we practised jumping our horses. The roads were deeply gutted by spring rains and the pressure of heavy trucks, but there were wood-trails good to explore, and interesting objectives like Williamstown or Yorktown. I fell into doing my thinking in the saddle. Naturally I wondered about my new job--my civilian job. It was not just an ordinary change from one breadwinning place to another. It was a new job in a world never convertible quite to the one that had kindled the war. It was impossible not to feel that the civilized structure had shaken and disintegrated a bit, or to escape the sense of great powers released. I was unable to decide whether the powers were cast for a rôle of great destruction or of great renewal. Even in Eustis we received newspapers. The urge and groan of those powers naturally worked into phrases now and then, and even into special tightly worded formulæ. I remember newspaper ejaculations, professorial dissertations, orators' exaggerations: "Capital and labor--Labor in its place--The proletariat--A new order"--and so forth. I felt confused and distrustful in the face of phrases and of the implied doctrines, old and new. Besides the business of demobilizing the national army, the remaining regular officers and non-coms went into the school of fire, and practised observation of shots over a beautiful relief map of the "Chemin-des-Dames." This was the most warlike thing we did and continued for several months. One day I took a walk beside the ordnance warehouses, and looked over at the rows of guns stretching for a quarter of a mile beside railroad tracks. In a short time I would be turning my back on these complicated engines. I was even sorry about it, a little; I had spent so much sweat and brain learning about their crankinesses. In that civil life to follow, I began to see that I wanted two things: 1, a job to give me a living; 2, a chance to discover and build under the new social and economic conditions. I was twenty-five, a college graduate, a first-lieutenant in the army. In the civilian world into which I was about to jump, most of my connections were with the university I had recently left, few or none in the business world. Why not enlist, then, in one of the basic industries, coal, oil, or steel? I liked steel--it was the basic American industry, and technically and economically it interested me. Why not enlist in steel? Get a laborer's job? Learn the business? And, besides, the chemical forces of change, I meditated, were at work at the _bottom_ of society-- The next day I sent in the resignation of my commission in the regular army of the United States.