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Page 29
For in truth we in England know very little about our bases abroad; about
what it means to supply the ever-growing needs of the English Armies in
France. The military world takes what has been done for granted; the
general English public supposes that the Tommies, when their days in the
home camps are done, get "somehow" conveyed to the front, being "somehow"
equipped, fed, clothed, nursed, and mended, and sent on their way across
France in interminable lines of trains. As to the details of the process,
it rarely troubles its head. The fact is, however, that the work of the
great supply bases abroad, of the various Corps and Services connected
with them--Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, railway and motor
transport--is a desperately interesting study; and during the past
eighteen months, under the "I.G.C."--Inspector-General of
Communications--has developed some of the best brains in the Army.
Two days spent under the guidance of the Base Commandant or an officer of
his staff among the docks and warehouses of a great French port, among the
huts of its reinforcement camp, which contains more men than Aldershot
before August, 1914, or in its workshops of the Army Ordnance Corps, gave
me my first experience of the organising power that has gone to these
departments of the war. The General in command of the base was there in
the first weeks of the struggle and during the great retreat. He retired
with his staff to Nantes--leaving only a broken motor-car behind
him!--just about the time that the French Government betook itself to
Bordeaux. But in September he was back again, and the building-up process
began, which has since known neither stop nor stay. That the commercial
needs of a great French port should have been able to accommodate
themselves as they have to the military needs of the British Army speaks
loudly for the tact and good feeling on both sides. The task has not been
at all times an easy one; and I could not help thinking as we walked
together through the crowded scene, that the tone and temper of the able
man beside me--his admiration, simply expressed, yet evidently profound,
for the French spirit in the war, and for the heroic unity of the country
through all ranks and classes, accounted for a great deal. In the presence
of a good-will so strong, difficulties disappear.
Look now at this immense hangar or storehouse--the largest in the
world--through which we are walking. It was completed three years before
the war, partly, it is said, by German money, to house the growing
cotton-trade of the port. It now houses a large proportion of the food of
the British Army. The hangar is half a mile long, and is bounded on one
side by the docks where the ships are discharging, and on the other by the
railway lines where the trains are loading up for the front.
You walk through avenues of bacon, through streets of biscuits and jam. On
the quays just outside, ships from England, Canada, Norway, Argentina,
Australia are pouring out their stores. Stand and watch the endless cranes
at work, and think what English sea power means! And on the other side
watch the packing of the trucks that are going to the front, the order and
perfection with which the requisitions, large and small, of every regiment
are supplied.
One thinks of the Crimean scandals. The ghost of Florence Nightingale
seems to move beside us, watching contentedly what has come of all that
long-reforming labour, dealing with the health, the sanitation, the food
and equipment of the soldier, in which she played her part; and one might
fancy the great shade pausing specially beside the wired-in space labelled
"Medical Comforts," and generally known as "The Cage." Medical
_necessaries_ are housed elsewhere; but here are the dainties, the special
foods, the easing appliances of all kinds which are to make life bearable
to many a sorely-wounded man.
As to the huge sheds of the Army Ordnance, which supply everything that
the soldier doesn't eat, all metal stores--nails, horseshoes, oil-cans,
barbed wire--by the ton; trenching-tools, wheelbarrows, pickaxes, razors,
sand-bags, knives, screws, shovels, picketing-pegs, and the like--they are
of course endless; and the men who work in them are housed in one of the
largest sheds, in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the Depot to the outsider are the
repairing sheds and workshops established in a suburb of the town to which
we drive on. For this is work that has never been done before in
connection with an army in the field. Day by day trains full of articles
for repair come down from the front. I happened to see a train of the
kind, later on, leaving a station close to the fighting line. Guns,
rifles, range-finders, gun-carriages, harness, all torn and useless
uniforms, tents, boots by the thousand, come to this base to be repaired,
or to be sent home for transformation into "shoddy" to the Yorkshire
towns. Nothing seems too large or too small for Colonel D.'s department.
Field-glasses, periscopes, water-bottles, they arrive from the trenches
with the same certainty as a wounded howitzer or machine-gun, and are
returned as promptly.
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