y
American machines brought over for the purpose, and even the others
are not wasted, for their tops are converted into boot-laces. In one
shop the worn-out tubes and springs of guns are replaced with new
ones. (Did you know that during an intense bombardment the springs of
the guns will last only two days?) In another fragments of valuable
metal sent in from the battle-field are melted and reused. (Perhaps
you were not aware that a 5-inch shell carries a copper band weighing
a pound and a quarter. The weight of copper shot off in this way
during a single brief bombardment was four hundred tons.) The millions
of empty shells which litter the ground behind the batteries are
cleaned and classified and shipped over to England to be reloaded.
Steel rails which the retreating Germans believed they had made quite
useless are here straightened out and used over again. Shattered
rifles, bits of harness, haversacks, machine-gun belts, trench
helmets, sand-bags, barbed wire--nothing escapes the Salvage Corps.
They even collect and send in old rags, which are sold for two hundred
and fifty dollars a ton. Let us talk less hereafter of _German_
efficiency.

Even more significant than the base camps of the efficiency and
painstaking thoroughness of the British war-machine are the training
camps scattered behind the lines. Typical of these is the great camp
at Etaples, on the French coast, where 150,000 men can be trained at a
time. These are not schools for raw recruits, mind you--that work is
done in England--but "finishing schools," as it were, where men who
are supposed to have already learned the business of war are given
final examinations in the various subjects in which they have received
instruction before being sent up to the front. And the soldier who is
unable to pass these final tests does not go to the front until he
can. The camp at Etaples, which is built on a stretch of rolling sand
beside the sea, is five miles long and a mile wide, and on every acre
of it there are squads of soldiers drilling, drilling, drilling. Here
a gymnastic instructor from Sandhurst, lithe and active as a panther,
is teaching a class of sergeants drawn from many regiments how to
become instructors themselves. His language would have amazed and
delighted Kipling's Ortheris and Mulvaney; I could have listened to
him all day. Over there a platoon of Highlanders are practising the
taking of German trenches. At the blast of a whistle they clamber