it well, and it is, moreover, just entering
on the period of its greatest efficiency.

In order to understand the workings and the ramifications of this
great machine in France (its work in England is another story) you
must begin your study of it at the base camps which the British have
established at Calais, Havre, Boulogne, and Rouen, and the
training-schools at Etaples and elsewhere. Let us take, for example,
"Cinder City," as the base camp outside Calais is called because the
ground on which it stands was made by dumping ships' cinders into a
marsh. It is in many respects one of the most remarkable cities in the
world. Its population, which fluctuates with the tide of war,
averages, I suppose, about one hundred thousand. It has many miles of
macadamized streets (as sandy locations are chosen for these base
camps, mud is almost unknown) lined with storehouses--one of them the
largest in the world--with stores, with machine-shops, churches,
restaurant, club-rooms, libraries, Y. M. C. A.'s--there are over a
thousand of them in the war zone--Salvation Army barracks, schools,
bathing establishments, theatres, motion-picture houses, hospitals for
men and hospitals for horses, and thousands upon thousands of portable
wooden huts. This city is lighted by electricity, it has highly
efficient police, fire, and street-cleaning departments, and its water
and sewage systems would make jealous many municipalities of twice its
size. Among its novel features is a school for army bakers and another
for army cooks, for good food has almost as much to do with winning
battles as good ammunition. But most significant and important of all
are the "economy shops" where are repaired or manufactured practically
everything required by an army. War, as the British have found, is a
staggeringly expensive business, and, in order that there may be a
minimum of wastage, they have organized a Salvage Corps whose
business it is to sort the litter of the battle-fields and to send
everything that can by any possibility be re-utilized to the "economy
shops" at the rear. In one of these shops I saw upward of a thousand
French and Belgian women renovating clothing that had come back from
the front, uniforms which arrived as bundles of muddy, bloody rags
being fumigated and cleaned and mended and pressed until they were
almost as good as new. Tens of thousands of boots are sent in to be
repaired; those that can stand the operation are soled and heeled b