The War on All Fronts: Englands Effort | Page 5

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