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Page 4
And now with her daughter under the special protection and guidance of the
war office, this distinguished woman followed the khaki-clad soldiers of
England, now numbered by millions, across the channel, and everything was
thrown freely open to her. She soon found out what the great supply bases,
on which the British army in France rests, really mean, made up of the
Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, Railroad, Motor, and Transport,
and she found it a deeply interesting study, "whose work has involved the
labor of some of the best brains in the army," and she learned the
organizing power that has gone to make the career of the English army in
France possible.
There was the immense dock, and its vast storehouse, the largest in the
world, "built three years before the war, partly, it is said, by German
money, to house the growing cotton trade of the port, but now it houses a
large proportion of the food of the British army," a building half a mile
long, bounded on one side by the docks, where the ships discharge the
stores and the men, and on the other by the railway lines where the trains
are perpetually loading for the front. On the quays ships of all nations,
except Germany, are pouring out their stores, and on the other side the
trucks that are going to the front are loading with the supplies that are
wanted for every regiment in the service. Her eyes light upon one wired in
space, labelled "Medical Comforts," and generally known as "The Cage,"
where, while medical necessaries are housed elsewhere, are "the dainties,
the special foods, the easing appliances of all kinds," which are to make
life bearable to the wounded men, and she stops to think how the shade of
Florence Nightingale would have paused at this spot.
The huge sheds of Army Ordnance are filled with everything that a soldier
does not eat, all metal stores, whatever, and the men who work in them are
housed in one of the longest sheds in tiers of bunks from floor to
ceiling, and then there are the repairing sheds and workshops, established
near by, and that is the most wonderful thing of the whole to my
mind--never done before in connection with an army in the field. Trainsful
of articles to be repaired come down from the front every day, and almost
every imaginable article that the men at the front can use, from guns to
boots, comes here to be repaired, or if found beyond repair, to be sent to
Yorkshire for shoddy. The marvellous thing is that, as soon as they are
received, they are repaired and made nearly as good as new and returned
to their owners at the front, a vast work in itself. The boot and uniform
sheds alone, where again she finds five hundred French women and girls,
and the harness-making room are doing an enormous work. The Colonel in
charge began work with one hundred and forty men, and is now employing
more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of
pounds a week to the British government.
Recreation and amusement are supplied in near locality for the waiting
soldiers and, although the snow is more than ankle-deep, they visit such
places as recreation rooms and cinema theaters, and on a neighboring hill
great troops of men are going through some of the last refinements of
drill before they start for the front. Here are trenches of all kinds and
patterns, in which the men may practise, planned according to the latest
experience brought from the front. "The instructors are all men returned
from the front, and the new recruits, trained up to this last point, would
not be patient of any other teachers."
Having thus seen all that one day could afford them at the very base of
the great army, our visitors make their way in closed motors through the
snow, passing scores of motor lorries, and other wagons, stuck in the
snow-drifts. They stop for the night at a pleasant hotel full of
officers, mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communication, and a
few of the mothers and sisters of the poor wounded in the neighboring
hospitals, who have come over to nurse them.
Every gun, every particle of munition, clothing, and equipment, and
whatever else is necessary, including the food of the armies, every horse,
every vehicle, has to be brought across the British channel, to maintain
and reinforce the ever-growing British army, and the ever-daily increasing
congestion at all the ports makes it more and more difficult every day to
receive, disembark, accommodate, and forward the multitude of men and the
masses of material, and all the time there are thousands of troops passing
through, thousands in the hospitals, and thousands at work on the docks
and storehouses. Everything tending to Tommy Atkins's comfort is supplied,
including again palatial cinemas and concerts, all of which results in
excellent behavior and the best of relations between the British soldier
and the French inhabitants. At the docks armies of laborers and lines of
ships discharging men, horses, timber, rations, fodder, coal, coke,
petrol, and the same at the storehouses and depots.
The visitors spend a long Sunday morning in the motor transport depot, and
it gave a good illustration of the complete system of discipline and
organization that prevailed everywhere. This depot began, said the Colonel
in charge, on the 13th of August, 1914, "with a few balls of string and a
bag of nails." Its present staff is about five hundred. All the drivers of
twenty thousand motor vehicles are tested here, and the depot exhibits
three hundred and fifty different types of vehicles, and in round figures,
one hundred thousand separate parts are now dealt with, stored, and
arranged in this same depot. The Sunday morning began with a simple
service in the Young Men's Christian Association hut, at which five
hundred motor-drivers attended, about half of the whole number in the
station.
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