The Base Commandant’s office was the sorting-house of the Expeditionary Force.  The relays of officers who had just come off the boats came here to report themselves.  They had sailed as it were under sealed orders and did not know their destination until they were enlightened by the Commandant, who received instructions from the headquarters in the field.  They waited about in groups outside his door, slapping their riding-boots or twisting neat little moustaches, which were the envy of subalterns just out of Sandhurst.

Through another door was the registry office through which all the Army’s letters passed inwards and outwards.  The military censors were there reading the letters of Private Atkins to his best girl, and to his second best.  They shook their heads over military strategy written in the trenches, and laughed quietly at the humour of men who looked on the best side of things, even if they were German shells or French fleas.  It was astonishing what a lot of humour passed through this central registry from men who were having a tragic time for England’s sake; but sometimes the military Censor had to blow his nose with violence because Private Atkins lapsed into pathos, and wrote of tragedy with a too poignant truth.

The Base Commandant was here at all hours.  Even two hours after midnight he sat in the inner room with tired secretaries who marvelled at the physical and mental strength of a man who at that hour could still dictate letters full of important detail without missing a point or a comma; though he came down early in the morning.  But he was responsible for the guarding of the Army’s store-cupboard—­that great hangar, half a mile long—­and for the discipline of a town full of soldiers who, without discipline, would make a merry hell of it, and for the orderly disposition of all the supplies at the base upon which the army in the field depends for its welfare.  It was not what men call a soft job.

Through the hotel where I stayed there was a continual flow of officers who came for one night only.  Their kit-bags and sleeping-bags were dumped into the hall, and these young gentlemen, some of whom had been gazetted only a few months ago, crowded into the little drawing-room to write their letters home before going to the front, and to inquire of each other what on earth there was to do in a town where lights are out at ten o’clock, where the theatres were all closed, and where rain was beating down on the pavements outside.

“How about a bath?” said one of them.  “It is about the last chance, I reckon.”

They took turns to the bathroom, thinking of the mud and vermin of the trenches which would soon be their home.  Among those who stayed in the sitting-room until the patron turned out the lights were several officers who had been on forty-eight hours’ leave from the front.  They had made a dash to London and back, they had seen the lights of Piccadilly again, and the crowds in the streets of a city which seemed to know nothing of war, they had dined with women in evening-dress who had asked innocent questions about the way of a modern battlefield, and they had said good-bye again to those who clung to them a little too long outside a carriage window.