The American locomotive bell impresses Europeans enormously. They wonder what it is for. On the whole they regard it with reverence; it confers a sort of ecclesiastical sanctity upon American railroad travel. A Scotsman once told me that whenever he visited America he used frequently to wake up in the sleeping-car, standing in some great railroad junction in the small hours, under the firm impression that he was back in his native town on a Sunday morning. As for the ordinary military stores, they come in one unceasing cataract. Gasoline tanks; water-tanks; cold-storage carcasses; bags of flour; canned meat; canned fruit; bales of clothing; consignments of tobacco; chewing-gum, books, and other comforts. Liberty motors; aeroplanes; machine guns; spare parts. The dingy, oddly painted ships come sliding down from the horizon, deposit them all in mountain ranges upon dock and wharf, then turn round and steal back to America for more. Shells are not landed here. They are touchy and inflammable folk, and have a private and exclusive place of debarkation of their own, higher up the river. But there is human freight to be deposited too. Here are two liners, newly docked. Each, despite her great size, is heeling over towards the wharf, as the biggest ships will when the whole cargo hangs over one side. One cargo is white, the other coloured. “Where yo’ from?” shrieks a stevedore, to the dusky grinning human mountain above him. “Seventy fo’, Fo’teen Street, Lebanon, Illinois!” pipes a solitary voice far up the height, before any one else can answer the question. There is a roar of laughter at this egotism, and another voice from the wharf enquires: “What camp?” “Camp Dodge! Labour Battalion!” roars an answering chorus. “Step right down, boys! We got lots of labour for you heah!” yells the humorist on the wharf. The white contingent on the other ship proves to be from Camp Sherman. What is of far more importance, however, is the fact that both ships possess clean bills of health, only nine cases of sickness being reported altogether. This is good news, for influenza and pneumonia have been rampant. Troops on the great transports have been saddened of late by the continuous spectacle of eager young hearts committed to the deep without ever having beheld their Promised Land. There have been rumours, too, of hundreds of stretcher-cases landed in Liverpool from a single convoy. But apparently the plague is stayed. We shall have a chance now to be killed—which is a very different matter from dying like a common civilian.