Only one thing ever disturbs the vast, orderly system.  The bony fingers of Death will persist in getting into the cogs of the machine.

The front is divided, according to military exigencies, into a number of roughly equal lengths called secteurs.  Each secteur is an administrative unit with its own government and its own system adapted to the local situation.  The heart of this unit is the railroad station at which the supplies arrive for the shell zone; in a normal secteur, one military train arrives every day bringing the needed supplies, and one hospital train departs, carrying the sick and wounded to the hospitals.  The station at the front is always a scene of considerable activity, especially when the train arrives; there are pictures of old poilus in red trousers pitching out yellow hay for the horses, commissary officers getting their rations, and artilleurs stacking shells.

The train not being able to continue into the shell zone, the supplies are carried to the distributing station at the trenches in a convoy of wagons, called the ravitaillement.  Every single night, somewhere along the road, each side tries to smash up the other’s ravitaillement.  To avoid this, the ravitaillement wagons start at different hours after dark, now at dusk, now at midnight.  Sometimes, close by the trenches on a clear, still night, the plashing and creaking of the enemy’s wagons can be heard through the massacred trees.  I remember being shelled along one bleak stretch of moorland road just after a drenching December rain.  The trench lights rising over The Wood, three miles away, made the wet road glow with a tarnished glimmer, and burnished the muddy pools into mirrors of pale light.  The ravitaillement creaked along in the darkness.  Suddenly a shell fell about a hundred yards away, and the wagons brought up jerkily, the harnesses rattling.  For ten minutes the Germans shelled the length of road just ahead of us, but no shell came closer to us than the first one.  About thirty “seventy-seven” shells burst, some on the road, some on the edges of the fields; we saw them as flashes of reddish-violet light close to the ground.  In the middle of the melee a trench light rose, showing the line of halted gray wagons, the motionless horses, and the helmeted drivers.  The whole affair passed in silence.  When it was judged that the last shell had fallen, whips cracked like pistol shots, and the line lumbered on again.

The food came to us fresh every day in a freight car fitted up like a butcher’s shop, in charge of a poilu who was a butcher in civilian life.  “So many men—­so many grammes,” and he would cut you off a slice.  There was a daily potato ration, and a daily extra, this last from a list ten articles long which began again every ten days, and included beans, macaroni, lentils, rice, and cheese.  The French army is very well and plenteously fed.  Coffee, sugar, wine, and even tea are ungrudgingly furnished.  These foods are