h such rapidity wear out
their tubes and their springs in a few days, it is necessary to rush
entire batteries to the repair-shops at the rear. And that provides
another burden for the railways.

In addition to the railways of standard gauge, the British have laid
down an astonishing trackage of narrow-gauge, Decauville, and
monorail systems. These portable and easily laid field railways twist
and turn and coil like snakes among the gun positions, the miniature
engines, with their strings of toy cars, puffing their way into the
heart of the artillery zone, where the ammunition is unloaded, sorted,
and classified in calibers, and then artfully hidden from the prying
eyes of enemy aviators and from their bombs. These great collections
of gun-food the English inelegantly term "ammunition dumps." Nor do
the trains that come up loaded go back empty, for upon the miniature
trucks are loaded the combings of the battle-field to be shipped back
to the "economy shops" in the rear. Where possible, wounded men are
sent back to the hospitals in like fashion, some of the railways
having trucks specially constructed for this purpose. Where the light
railways stop the monorail systems begin, food, cartridges, and mail
being sent right up into the forward trenches in small cars or baskets
suspended from a single overhead rail and pushed by hand. They look
not unlike the old-fashioned cash-and-parcel carriers which were used
in American department stores before the present system of pneumatic
tubes came in.

Comprising another branch of the L. C.'s multifarious activities are
the field telephones, whose lines of black-and-white poles run out
across the landscape in every direction. And it is no haphazard and
hastily improvised system either, but as good in every respect as you
will find in American cities. It has to be good. Too much depends upon
it. An indistinct message might cost a thousand lives; a break-down in
the system might mean a great military disaster. Every officer of
importance in the British zone has a telephone at hand, and as the
armies advance the telephones go with them, the wires and portable
instruments being transported by the motor-cycle despatch riders of
the Army Signal Corps, so that frequently within thirty minutes after
a battalion has captured a German position its commander will be in
telephonic communication with Advanced G. H. Q. The speed with which
the connections are made would be remarkable even in N