And now with her daughter under the special protection and guidance of the war office, this distinguished woman followed the khaki-clad soldiers of England, now numbered by millions, across the channel, and everything was thrown freely open to her.  She soon found out what the great supply bases, on which the British army in France rests, really mean, made up of the Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, Railroad, Motor, and Transport, and she found it a deeply interesting study, “whose work has involved the labor of some of the best brains in the army,” and she learned the organizing power that has gone to make the career of the English army in France possible.

There was the immense dock, and its vast storehouse, the largest in the world, “built three years before the war, partly, it is said, by German money, to house the growing cotton trade of the port, but now it houses a large proportion of the food of the British army,” a building half a mile long, bounded on one side by the docks, where the ships discharge the stores and the men, and on the other by the railway lines where the trains are perpetually loading for the front.  On the quays ships of all nations, except Germany, are pouring out their stores, and on the other side the trucks that are going to the front are loading with the supplies that are wanted for every regiment in the service.  Her eyes light upon one wired in space, labelled “Medical Comforts,” and generally known as “The Cage,” where, while medical necessaries are housed elsewhere, are “the dainties, the special foods, the easing appliances of all kinds,” which are to make life bearable to the wounded men, and she stops to think how the shade of Florence Nightingale would have paused at this spot.

The huge sheds of Army Ordnance are filled with everything that a soldier does not eat, all metal stores, whatever, and the men who work in them are housed in one of the longest sheds in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling, and then there are the repairing sheds and workshops, established near by, and that is the most wonderful thing of the whole to my mind—­never done before in connection with an army in the field.  Trainsful of articles to be repaired come down from the front every day, and almost every imaginable article that the men at the front can use, from guns to boots, comes here to be repaired, or if found beyond repair, to be sent to Yorkshire for shoddy.  The marvellous thing is that, as soon as they are received, they are repaired and made nearly as good as new and returned to their owners at the front, a vast work in itself.  The boot and uniform sheds alone, where again she finds five hundred French women and girls, and the harness-making room are doing an enormous work.  The Colonel in charge began work with one hundred and forty men, and is now employing more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of pounds a week to the British government.