nt, 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.
The same day they explored endless camps and the wards of a Red Cross
hospital. It was impossible to take in everything at once, and our ladies
retired at night, bewildered by mingled impressions of "human energy,
human intelligence, human suffering," but full of pride and exultation at
the efficiency of their country and of the good relations of their
soldiers with the French. They carried with them as a last impression of
the day the picture of a canteen worked day and night in three shifts by a
heroic band of women close by the railway station, full of soldiers just
departing for the front, young, gay and full of spirits; then came the
train to take the soldiers off for the fighting line, and the women, left
behi
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