t hand_; wet and dry canteens,
libraries, recreation huts, tea and coffee huts, palatial
cinemas, concerts. And what are the results? Excellent
behaviour; excellent relations between the British soldier
and the French inhabitants; absence of all serious crime.

Then look at the docks. You will see there armies of
labourers, and long lines of ships discharging horses,
timber, rations, fodder, coal, coke, petrol. Or at the
stores and depots. It would take you days to get any idea of
the huge quantities of stores, or of the new and ingenious
means of space economy and quick distribution. As to the
Works Department--camps and depots are put up "while you
wait" by the R.E. officers and unskilled military labour.
Add to all this the armies of clerks, despatch riders, and
motor-cyclists--and the immense hospital _personnel_--then,
if you make any intelligible picture of it in your mind, you
will have some idea of what bases like these mean.

Pondering these notes, it seemed to me that the only way to get some kind
of "intelligible picture" in two short days was to examine something in
detail, and the rest in general! Accordingly, we spent a long Sunday
morning in the Motor Transport Depot, which is the creation of Colonel B.,
and perhaps as good an example as one could find anywhere in France of the
organising talent of the able British officer.

The depot opened in a theatre on the 13th of August, 1914. "It began,"
says Colonel B., "with a few balls of string and a bag of nails!" Its
staff then consisted of 6 officers and 91 N.C.O.'s and men--its permanent
staff at present is about 500. All the drivers of some 20,000 motor
vehicles--nearly 40,000 men--are tested here and, if necessary, instructed
before going up to the fighting lines; and the depot deals with 350
different types of vehicles. In round figures 100,000 separate parts are
now dealt with, stored, and arranged in the depot. The system of records
and accounts is extraordinarily perfect, and so ingenious that it seems to
work itself.

Meanwhile Colonel B.'s relations with his army of chauffeurs, of whom
about 1,000 are always housed on the premises, are exceedingly human and
friendly in spite of the strictness of the army discipline. Most of his
men who are not married, the Colonel tells me, have found a "friend," in
the town, one or other of its trimly dressed girls, with whom the En