The Base feeds the Army, binds up its wounds, and repairs its wastage.  If you would get a glimpse of the feverish activities of the Base and understand what it means to the Army, you should take up your position on the bridge by the sluices that break the fall of the river into the harbour, close to the quay, where the trawlers are nudging each other at their moorings and the fishermen are shouting in the patois of the littoral amid the creaking of blocks, the screaming of winches, and the shrill challenge of the gulls.  Stand where the Military Police are on point duty and you will see a stream of Red Cross motor ambulances, a trickle of base details, a string of invalided horses in charge of an A.V.C. corporal, and a khaki-painted motor-bus crowded with drafts for the Front.  Big ocean liners, flying the Red Cross, lie at their moorings, and lofty electric cranes gyrate noiselessly over supply ships unloading their stores, while animated swarms of dockers in khaki pile up a great ant-heap of sacks in the sheds with a passionless concentration that seems like the workings of blind instinct.  And here are warehouses whose potentialities of wealth are like Mr. Thrale’s brewery—­wheat, beef, fodder, and the four spices dear to the delicate palates of the Indian contingent.  Somewhere behind there is a park of ammunition guarded like a harem.  In the railway sidings are duplicate supply trains, steam up, trucks sealed, and the A.S.C. officer on board ready to start for rail-head with twenty-four hours’ supplies.  Beyond the maze of “points” is moored the strangest of all rolling-stock, the grey-coated armoured-train, within whose iron walls are domesticated two amphibious petty officers darning their socks.

In huge offices improvised out of deal boarding Army Service Corps officers are docketing stupendous files of way-bills, loading-tables, and indents, what time the Railway Transport Officer is making up his train of trucks for the corresponding supplies.  The A.S.C. uses up more stationery than all the departments in Whitehall, and its motto is litera scripta manet—­which has been explained by an A.S.C. sergeant, instructing a class of potential officers, as meaning “Never do anything without a written order, but, whatever you do, never write one.”  For an A.S.C. court of inquiry has as impassioned a preference for written over oral evidence as the old Court of Chancery.  So that if your way-bill testifies: 

Truck No.         Contents
19414          Jam 36 x 50

and from the thirty-six cases of fifty pots one pot of jam is missing on arrival at rail-head, then, though truck 19414 arrived sealed and your labels undefaced, it will go hard with you as Train Officer unless you can produce that pot.