say, they seemed to understand each other quite well."

III

It was with this railway-station canteen that my latest memories of the
great base are concerned. All the afternoon of our second day at ---- was
spent in seeing a fine Red Cross hospital, and then in walking or driving
round the endless reinforcement and hospital camps in the open country.
Everywhere the same vigourous expanding organisation, the same ceaselessly
growing numbers, the same humanity and care in detail. "How many years
have we been at war?" one tends to ask oneself in bewilderment, as the
spectacle unrolls itself. "Is it possible that all this is the work of
eighteen months?" And I am reminded of the Scotch sergeant's reply to his
German captive, who asked his opinion about the duration of the war. "I'll
tell you what--it's the furrst five years that'll be the worst!" We
seem--in the bases--to have slipped through them already, measuring by any
of the ordinary ratios of work to time. On my return home, a diplomat
representing one of the neutral nations, told me that the Military
Secretary of his staff had been round the English bases in France, and had
come back with his "eyes starting out of his head." Having seen them
myself, the phrase seemed to me quite natural.

Then, last of all, as the winter evening fell, we turned toward the
canteen at the railway-station. We found it going on in an old goods'
shed, simply fitted up with a long tea and coffee bar, tables and chairs;
and in some small adjacent rooms. It was filled from end to end with a
crowd of soldiers, who after many hours of waiting, were just departing
for the front. The old shabby room, with its points of bright light, and
its shadowy sides and corners, made a Rembrandtesque setting for the
moving throng of figures. Some men were crowding round the bar; some were
writing letters in haste to post before the train went off; the piano was
going, and a few, gathered round it, were singing the songs of the day, of
which the choruses were sometimes taken up in the room. The men--drafts
going up to different regiments on the line--appeared to me to come from
many parts. The broad Yorkshire and Cumbrian speech, Scotch, the cockney
of the Home Counties, the Northumberland burr, the tongues of Devon and
Somerset--one seemed to hear them all in turn. The demands at the counter
had slackened a little, and I was presently listening to some of the talk
of the indefatigable helpers who work t