brave sight and fortifying to see a Supply Column winding in and out
between the poplars on the perilously arched _pave_ of the long sinuous
roads, each wagon keeping its distance, like battleships in line, and
every one of them boasting a good Christian name chalked up on the
tail-board. For what his horses are to a driver and his eighteen-pounder
to a gunner, such is his wagon to the A.S.C. man who is detailed to it.
It is his caravan. Many a time, on long and lonely journeys from the
Base to the Front, have I been cheered to find a Supply Column drawn up
on the roadside in a wooded valley, on a bare undulating down, or in a
chalk quarry, while the men were making tea over a blue wood fire. If
you love a gipsy life join the A.S.C.

Within this one-mile radius of the A.S.C. headquarters at the Base are
some twenty military hospitals improvised out of hotels, gaming-houses,
and railway waiting-rooms. For the Base is the great Clearing House for
the sick and wounded, and its register of patients is a kind of
barometer of the state of affairs at the Front. When that register sinks
very low, it means that the atmospheric conditions at the Front are
getting stormy, and that an order has come down to evacuate and prepare
four thousand beds. Then you watch the newspapers, for you know
something is going to happen up there. And in those same hospitals men
are working night and day; the bacteriologists studying "smears" under
microscopes, while the surgeons are classifying, operating, "dressing,"
marking temperature-charts, and annotating case-sheets. And in every
hospital there is a faint mysterious incense, compounded not
disagreeably of chloride of sodium and iodised catgut, which intensifies
the dim religious atmosphere of the shaded wards. If G.H.Q. is the
greatest of military academies, the Base hospitals are indubitably the
wisest of medical schools. Never have the sciences of bacteriology and
surgery been studied with such devotion as under these urgent clinical
impulses. Here are men of European reputation who have left their
laboratories and consulting-rooms at home to wage a never-ending
scientific contest with death and corruption. They have slain
"frostbite" with lanoline, turpentine, and a change of socks; they have
fought septic wounds with chloride of sodium and the ministries of
unlimited oxygen; they have defied "shock" after amputation by
"blocking" the nerves of the limb by spinal injection, as a signalman