As to the huge sheds of the Army Ordnance, which supply everything that the soldier doesn’t eat, all metal stores—­nails, horseshoes, oil-cans, barbed wire—­by the ton; trenching-tools, wheelbarrows, pickaxes, razors, sand-bags, knives, screws, shovels, picketing-pegs, and the like—­they are of course endless; and the men who work in them are housed in one of the largest sheds, in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Depot to the outsider are the repairing sheds and workshops established in a suburb of the town to which we drive on.  For this is work that has never been done before in connection with an army in the field.  Day by day trains full of articles for repair come down from the front.  I happened to see a train of the kind, later on, leaving a station close to the fighting line.  Guns, rifles, range-finders, gun-carriages, harness, all torn and useless uniforms, tents, boots by the thousand, come to this base to be repaired, or to be sent home for transformation into “shoddy” to the Yorkshire towns.  Nothing seems too large or too small for Colonel D.’s department.  Field-glasses, periscopes, water-bottles, they arrive from the trenches with the same certainty as a wounded howitzer or machine-gun, and are returned as promptly.

In one shed, my guide called my attention to shelves on which were a number of small objects in china and metal.  “They were found in kits left on the field,” he says gently.  “Wherever we can identify the owner, such things are carefully returned to his people.  These could not be identified.”

I took up a little china dog, a bit of coarse French pottery, which some dead father had bought, at Poperinghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for the children at home.  Near by were “souvenirs”—­bits of shell, of German equipment; then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck-medallion of a saint—­and so on—­every fragment steeped in the poignancy of sudden death—­death in youth, at the height of life.

The boot and uniform sheds, where 500 French women and girls, under soldier-foremen, are busy, the harness-mending room, and the engineering workshops might reassure those pessimists among us—­especially of my own sex—­who think that the male is naturally and incorrigibly a wasteful animal.  Colonel D. shows me the chart which is the record of his work, and its steadily mounting efficiency.  He began work with 140 men, he is now employing more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of pounds a week to the British Government.  He makes all his own power, and has four or five powerful dynamos at work.

We come out into a swirl of snow, and henceforward sightseeing is difficult.  Yet we do our best to defy the weather.  We tramp through the deepening snow of the great camp, which lines the slopes of the hills above the river and the town, visiting its huts and recreation-rooms, its Cinema theatre, and its stores, and taking tea with the Colonel of an Infantry Base Depot, who is to be our escort on the morrow.