The British soldier in France and Flanders is not a self-supporting body.

He needs support, and a great deal of support.  I once saw his day’s rations set forth on a tray, and it seemed to me that I could not have consumed them in a week of good appetite.  The round of meat is flanked by plenteous bacon, jam, cheese, and bread.  In addition there are vegetables, tea, sugar, salt, and condiments, with occasional butter; and once a week come two ounces of tobacco and a box of matches for each ounce.  But the formidable item is the meat.  And then the British soldier wants more than food; he wants, for instance, fuel, letters, cleanliness; he wants clothing, and all the innumerable instruments and implements of war.  He wants regularly, and all the time.

Hence you have to imagine wide steady streams of all manner of things converging upon Northern France not only from Britain but from round about the globe.  The force of an imperative demand draws them powerfully in, night and day, as a magnet might.  It is impossible to trace exactly either the direction or the separate constituents of these great streams of necessaries.  But it is possible to catch them, or at any rate one of them, at the most interesting point of its course:  the point at which the stream, made up of many converging streams, divides suddenly and becomes many streams again.

That point is the rail-head.

Now, a military rail-head is merely an ordinary average little railway station, with a spacious yard.  There is nothing superficially romantic about it.  It does not even mark the end of a line of railway.  I have in mind one which served as the Head-quarters of a Divisional Supply Column.  The organism served just one division—­out of the very many divisions in France and Flanders.  It was under the command of a Major.  This Major, though of course in khaki and employing the same language and general code as a regimental Major, was not a bit like a regimental Major.  He was no more like a regimental Major than I am myself.  He had a different mentality, outlook, preoccupation.  He was a man in business.  He received orders—­I use the word in the business sense—­from the Brigades of the Division; and those orders, ever varying, had to be executed and delivered within thirty-six hours.  Quite probably he had never seen a trench; I should be neither surprised nor pained to learn that he could only hit a haystack with a revolver by throwing the revolver at the haystack.  His subordinates resembled him.  Strategy, artillery-mathematics, the dash of infantry charges—­these matters were not a bit in their line.  Nevertheless, when you read in a despatch that during a prolonged action supplies went regularly up to the Front under heavy fire, you may guess that fortitude and courage are considerably in their line.  These officers think about their arriving trains, and about emptying them in the shortest space of time; and they think about their motor-lorries and the condition thereof; and they pass their lives in checking lists and in giving receipts for things and taking receipts for things.  Their honour may be in a receipt.  And all this is the very basis of war.