me for transformation into "shoddy" to the Yorkshire
towns. Nothing seems too large or too small for Colonel D.'s department.
Field-glasses, periscopes, water-bottles, they arrive from the trenches
with the same certainty as a wounded howitzer or machine-gun, and are
returned as promptly.

In one shed, my guide called my attention to shelves on which were a
number of small objects in china and metal. "They were found in kits left
on the field," he says gently. "Wherever we can identify the owner, such
things are carefully returned to his people. These could not be
identified."

I took up a little china dog, a bit of coarse French pottery, which some
dead father had bought, at Poperinghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for the
children at home. Near by were "souvenirs"--bits of shell, of German
equipment; then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck-medallion of a
saint--and so on--every fragment steeped in the poignancy of sudden
death--death in youth, at the height of life.

The boot and uniform sheds, where 500 French women and girls, under
soldier-foremen, are busy, the harness-mending room, and the engineering
workshops might reassure those pessimists among us--especially of my own
sex--who think that the male is naturally and incorrigibly a wasteful
animal. Colonel D. shows me the chart which is the record of his work, and
its steadily mounting efficiency. He began work with 140 men, he is now
employing more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving
thousands of pounds a week to the British Government. He makes all his own
power, and has four or five powerful dynamos at work.

We come out into a swirl of snow, and henceforward sightseeing is
difficult. Yet we do our best to defy the weather. We tramp through the
deepening snow of the great camp, which lines the slopes of the hills
above the river and the town, visiting its huts and recreation-rooms, its
Cinema theatre, and its stores, and taking tea with the Colonel of an
Infantry Base Depot, who is to be our escort on the morrow.

But on the last morning before we start we mount to the plateau above the
reinforcement camp, where the snow lies deep and the wind blows one of the
sharpest blasts of the winter. Here are bodies of men going through some
of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front; here are
trenches of all kinds and patterns, revetted in ways new and old, and
planned according to the latest experience brought from the fighting lin