who had been more than “touched,” and who were the shattered wrecks of men, that I realized again the immensity of the horror through which these other men had passed and to which some of them were going back.  When the shrieks of poor tortured boys rang in my ears, when one day I passed an officer sitting up in his cot and laughing with insane mirth at his own image in a mirror, and when I saw men with both legs amputated up to the thighs, or with one leg torn to ribbons, and another already sawn away, lying among blinded and paralysed men, and men smashed out of human recognition but still alive, that I knew the courage of those others, who having seen and known, went back to risk the same frightfulness.

7

There was always a drama worth watching at the British base, for it was the gate of those who came in and of those who went out, “the halfway house” as a friend of mine called another place in France, between the front and home.

Everything came here first—­the food for guns and men, new boots for soldiers who had marched the leather off their feet; the comforters and body-belts knitted by nimble-fingered girls, who in suburban houses and country factories had put a little bit of love into every stitch; chloroform and morphia for army doctors who have moments of despair when their bottles get empty; ambulances, instruments, uniforms, motor lorries; all the letters which came to France full of prayers and hopes; and all the men who came to fill up the places of those for whom there are still prayers, but no more hope on this side of the river.  It was the base of the British Expeditionary Force, and the Army in the field would be starved in less than a week if it were cut off from this port of supplies.

There was a hangar here, down by the docks, half a mile long.  I suppose it was the largest shed in the world, and it was certainly the biggest store-cupboard ever kept under lock and key by a Mother Hubbard with a lot of hungry boys to feed.  Their appetites were prodigious, so that every day thousands of cases were shifted out of this cupboard and sent by train and motor-car to the front.  But always new cases were arriving in boats that are piloted into harbour across a sea where strange fish came up from the deeps at times.  So the hangar was never empty, and on the signature of a British officer the British soldiers might be sure of their bully beef, and fairly sure of a clean shirt or two when the old ones had been burnt by the order of a medical officer with a delicate nose and high ideals in a trench.

New men as well as new stores came in the boats to this harbour, which was already crowded with craft not venturesome in a sea where one day huge submarine creatures lurked about.  I watched some Tommies arrive.  They had had a nasty “dusting” on the voyage, and as they marched through the streets of the port some of them looked rather washed out.  They carried their rifles upside down as though that might ease the burden of them, and they had that bluish look of men who have suffered a bad bout of sea-sickness.  But they pulled themselves up when they came into the chief square where the French girls at the flower stalls, and ladies at the hotel windows, and a group of French and Belgian soldiers under the shelter of an arcade, watched them pass through the rain.