hese birdcages full of birds and comprehends the spirit of
flight, one is less surprised at the unimaginable feats which are daily
performed over there in the sky northwards and eastwards. I saw a
man who flew over Ghent twice a week with the regularity of a train.
He had never been seriously hit. These airmen have a curious
physical advantage. The noise of their own engine, it is said,
prevents them from hearing the explosions of the shrapnel aimed at
them.

The British soldier in France and Flanders is not a self-supporting
body.

He needs support, and a great deal of support. I once saw his day's
rations set forth on a tray, and it seemed to me that I could not have
consumed them in a week of good appetite. The round of meat is
flanked by plenteous bacon, jam, cheese, and bread. In addition
there are vegetables, tea, sugar, salt, and condiments, with
occasional butter; and once a week come two ounces of tobacco
and a box of matches for each ounce. But the formidable item is the
meat. And then the British soldier wants more than food; he wants,
for instance, fuel, letters, cleanliness; he wants clothing, and all the
innumerable instruments and implements of war. He wants
regularly, and all the time.

Hence you have to imagine wide steady streams of all manner of
things converging upon Northern France not only from Britain but
from round about the globe. The force of an imperative demand
draws them powerfully in, night and day, as a magnet might. It is
impossible to trace exactly either the direction or the separate
constituents of these great streams of necessaries. But it is possible
to catch them, or at any rate one of them, at the most interesting
point of its course: the point at which the stream, made up of many
converging streams, divides suddenly and becomes many streams
again.

That point is the rail-head.

Now, a military rail-head is merely an ordinary average little railway
station, with a spacious yard. There is nothing superficially romantic
about it. It does not even mark the end of a line of railway. I have in
mind one which served as the Head-quarters of a Divisional Supply
Column. The organism served just one division--out of the very
many divisions in France and Flanders. It was under the command
of a Major. This Major, though of course in khaki and employing the
same language and general code as a regimental Major, was not a
bit like a regimental Major. He was no more like a regimental Major