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Page 30
In one shed, my guide called my attention to shelves on which were a
number of small objects in china and metal. "They were found in kits left
on the field," he says gently. "Wherever we can identify the owner, such
things are carefully returned to his people. These could not be
identified."
I took up a little china dog, a bit of coarse French pottery, which some
dead father had bought, at Poperinghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for the
children at home. Near by were "souvenirs"--bits of shell, of German
equipment; then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck-medallion of a
saint--and so on--every fragment steeped in the poignancy of sudden
death--death in youth, at the height of life.
The boot and uniform sheds, where 500 French women and girls, under
soldier-foremen, are busy, the harness-mending room, and the engineering
workshops might reassure those pessimists among us--especially of my own
sex--who think that the male is naturally and incorrigibly a wasteful
animal. Colonel D. shows me the chart which is the record of his work, and
its steadily mounting efficiency. He began work with 140 men, he is now
employing more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving
thousands of pounds a week to the British Government. He makes all his own
power, and has four or five powerful dynamos at work.
We come out into a swirl of snow, and henceforward sightseeing is
difficult. Yet we do our best to defy the weather. We tramp through the
deepening snow of the great camp, which lines the slopes of the hills
above the river and the town, visiting its huts and recreation-rooms, its
Cinema theatre, and its stores, and taking tea with the Colonel of an
Infantry Base Depot, who is to be our escort on the morrow.
But on the last morning before we start we mount to the plateau above the
reinforcement camp, where the snow lies deep and the wind blows one of the
sharpest blasts of the winter. Here are bodies of men going through some
of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front; here are
trenches of all kinds and patterns, revetted in ways new and old, and
planned according to the latest experience brought from the fighting line.
The instructors here, as at other training-camps in France, are all men
returned from the front. The men to whom they have to give the final touch
of training--men so near themselves to the real thing--are impatient of
any other sort.
As we stand beside the trenches under the bright sun and piercing wind,
looking at the dark lines of British soldiers on the snow, and listening
to the explanations of a most keen and courteous officer, one's eyes
wander, on the one side, over the great town and port, over the French
coast and the distant sea, and on the other side, inland, over the
beautiful French landscape with its farms and country houses. Everything
one sees is steeped in history, a mingled history, in which England and
France up to five centuries ago bore an almost equal share. Now again they
are mingled here; all the old enmities buried in a comradeship that goes
deeper far than they, a comradeship of the spirit that will surely mould
the life of both nations for years to come.
How we grudged the snow and the low-sweeping clouds and the closed motor,
on our drive of the next day! I remember little more of it than occasional
glimpses of the tall cliffs that stand sentinel along the river, a hasty
look at a fine church above a steeply built town, an army lorry stuck deep
in the snow-drifts, and finally the quays and ships of another base port.
Our escort, Colonel S., pilots us to a pleasant hotel full of officers,
mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communications, with a few poor
wives and mothers among them who have come over to nurse their wounded in
one or other of the innumerable hospitals of the base.
Before dinner the general commanding the base had found me out and I had
told my story.
"Oh, we'll put some notes together for you. We were up most of last night.
I dare say we shall be up most of this. But a little more or less doesn't
matter." I protested most sincerely. But it is always the busiest men who
shoulder the extra burdens; and the notes duly reached me. From them, from
the talk of others spending their last ounce of brain and energy in the
service of the base, and from the evidence of my own eyes, let me try and
draw some general picture of what that service is: Suppose a British
officer speaking:
Remember first that every man, every horse, every round of
ammunition, every article of clothing and equipment, all the
guns and vehicles, and nearly all the food have to be
brought across the English Channel to maintain and reinforce
the ever-growing British Army, which holds now so important
a share of the fighting line in France. The ports of entry
are already overtaxed by the civil and military needs of
France herself. Imagine how difficult it is--and how the
difficulty grows daily with the steady increase of the
British Army--to receive, disembark, accommodate, and
forward the multitude of men and the masses of material!
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