ew York. I have
seen an officer at General Headquarters establish communication with
the Provost Marshal's office in Paris in three minutes, and with the
War Office in London in ten.

I might mention in passing that nowadays the General Headquarters of
an army (G. H. Q. it is always called on the British front, Grand
Quartier-General on the French, and Comando Supremo on the Italian) is
usually eight, ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty-five miles behind the
firing-line. Most of the commanding generals have, however, advanced
headquarters, considerably nearer the front, where they usually remain
during important actions. It is said that at Waterloo Napoleon and
Wellington watched each other through their telescopes. Compare this
with the battle for Verdun, where the headquarters of the Crown Prince
must have been at least thirty miles from those of General Nivelle at
Souilly.

If one of the greatest triumphs of the war is the creation of the
transport system, another is the maintenance, often under heavy
shell-fire, of the highways on which that transport moves. No one can
imagine what the traffic from the Channel up to the British front is
like; one must see it to believe it. The roads are as crowded with
traffic as is Fifth Avenue on a sunny afternoon. Every fifty yards or
so are military police, mounted and afoot, who control the traffic
with small red flags as do the New York bluecoats with their
stop-and-go signs. So incredibly dense was the volume of traffic
during the Somme offensive that it is little exaggeration to say that
an active man could have started immediately back of the British front
and could have made his way to Albert, twenty miles distant, if not,
indeed, to the English Channel, by jumping from lorry to wagon, from
wagon to ambulance, from ambulance to motor-bus. In going from Albert
up to the front I passed hundreds, yes, thousands of lumbering
motor-lorries bearing every kind of supply from barbed wire to
marmalade. In order to avoid confusion, the lorries belonging to the
ammunition-train have painted on their sides a shell, while those
comprising the supply column are designated by a four-leaf clover. A
whole series of other distinctive emblems, such as stars, crescents,
pyramids, Maltese crosses, unicorns, make it possible to tell at a
glance to what division or unit a vehicle belongs. I passed six-mule
teams from Missouri and Mississippi hauling wagons made in South Bend,
Indiana, which were p