lking. It was completed three years before
the war, partly, it is said, by German money, to house the growing
cotton-trade of the port. It now houses a large proportion of the food of
the British Army. The hangar is half a mile long, and is bounded on one
side by the docks where the ships are discharging, and on the other by the
railway lines where the trains are loading up for the front.

You walk through avenues of bacon, through streets of biscuits and jam. On
the quays just outside, ships from England, Canada, Norway, Argentina,
Australia are pouring out their stores. Stand and watch the endless cranes
at work, and think what English sea power means! And on the other side
watch the packing of the trucks that are going to the front, the order and
perfection with which the requisitions, large and small, of every regiment
are supplied.

One thinks of the Crimean scandals. The ghost of Florence Nightingale
seems to move beside us, watching contentedly what has come of all that
long-reforming labour, dealing with the health, the sanitation, the food
and equipment of the soldier, in which she played her part; and one might
fancy the great shade pausing specially beside the wired-in space labelled
"Medical Comforts," and generally known as "The Cage." Medical
_necessaries_ are housed elsewhere; but here are the dainties, the special
foods, the easing appliances of all kinds which are to make life bearable
to many a sorely-wounded man.

As to the huge sheds of the Army Ordnance, which supply everything that
the soldier doesn't eat, all metal stores--nails, horseshoes, oil-cans,
barbed wire--by the ton; trenching-tools, wheelbarrows, pickaxes, razors,
sand-bags, knives, screws, shovels, picketing-pegs, and the like--they are
of course endless; and the men who work in them are housed in one of the
largest sheds, in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Depot to the outsider are the
repairing sheds and workshops established in a suburb of the town to which
we drive on. For this is work that has never been done before in
connection with an army in the field. Day by day trains full of articles
for repair come down from the front. I happened to see a train of the
kind, later on, leaving a station close to the fighting line. Guns,
rifles, range-finders, gun-carriages, harness, all torn and useless
uniforms, tents, boots by the thousand, come to this base to be repaired,
or to be sent ho