Recreation and amusement are supplied in near locality for the waiting soldiers and, although the snow is more than ankle-deep, they visit such places as recreation rooms and cinema theaters, and on a neighboring hill great troops of men are going through some of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front.  Here are trenches of all kinds and patterns, in which the men may practise, planned according to the latest experience brought from the front.  “The instructors are all men returned from the front, and the new recruits, trained up to this last point, would not be patient of any other teachers.”

Having thus seen all that one day could afford them at the very base of the great army, our visitors make their way in closed motors through the snow, passing scores of motor lorries, and other wagons, stuck in the snow-drifts.  They stop for the night at a pleasant hotel full of officers, mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communication, and a few of the mothers and sisters of the poor wounded in the neighboring hospitals, who have come over to nurse them.

Every gun, every particle of munition, clothing, and equipment, and whatever else is necessary, including the food of the armies, every horse, every vehicle, has to be brought across the British channel, to maintain and reinforce the ever-growing British army, and the ever-daily increasing congestion at all the ports makes it more and more difficult every day to receive, disembark, accommodate, and forward the multitude of men and the masses of material, and all the time there are thousands of troops passing through, thousands in the hospitals, and thousands at work on the docks and storehouses.  Everything tending to Tommy Atkins’s comfort is supplied, including again palatial cinemas and concerts, all of which results in excellent behavior and the best of relations between the British soldier and the French inhabitants.  At the docks armies of laborers and lines of ships discharging men, horses, timber, rations, fodder, coal, coke, petrol, and the same at the storehouses and depots.

The visitors spend a long Sunday morning in the motor transport depot, and it gave a good illustration of the complete system of discipline and organization that prevailed everywhere.  This depot began, said the Colonel in charge, on the 13th of August, 1914, “with a few balls of string and a bag of nails.”  Its present staff is about five hundred.  All the drivers of twenty thousand motor vehicles are tested here, and the depot exhibits three hundred and fifty different types of vehicles, and in round figures, one hundred thousand separate parts are now dealt with, stored, and arranged in this same depot.  The Sunday morning began with a simple service in the Young Men’s Christian Association hut, at which five hundred motor-drivers attended, about half of the whole number in the station.