For the feeding of the Army is a delicate business and complicated.  It is not enough to secure that there be sufficient “caloric units” in the men’s rations; there are questions of taste.  The Brahmin will not touch beef; the Mahomedan turns up his nose at pork; the Jain is a vegetarian; the Ghurkha loves the flesh of the goat.  And every Indian must have his ginger, garlic, red chilli, and turmeric, and his chupattis of unleavened bread.  One such warehouse we entered and beheld with stupefaction mountainous boxes of ghee and hogsheads of goor, rice, dried apricots, date-palms, and sultanas.  Storekeepers in turbans stood round us, who, being asked whether it was well with the Indian and his food, answered us with a great shout, like the Ephesians, “Yea, the exalted Government hath done great things and praised be its name.”  To which we replied “Victory to the Holy Ganges water.”  Their lustrous eyes beamed at the salutation.

Great, indeed, is the Q.M.G.  He supplies manna in the wilderness, and like the manna of the Israelites it has never been known to fail.  It is of him that the soldier in the trenches says, in the words of the prophet, “He hath filled my belly with his delicates.”  And his caravans cover the face of the earth.  You meet them everywhere, each Supply Column a self-contained unit like a fleet.  It has its O.C., its cooks, its seventy-two motor lorries, with three men to each, and its “mobiles” or travelling workshops with dynamo, lathe, drilling machine, and a crew of skilled artificers, ready to tackle any motor-lorry that is put out of action.  I take off my hat to those handy-men; many times have they helped me out of a tight place and performed delicate operations on the internal organs of my military car in the inhospitable night.  It is a brave sight and fortifying to see a Supply Column winding in and out between the poplars on the perilously arched pave of the long sinuous roads, each wagon keeping its distance, like battleships in line, and every one of them boasting a good Christian name chalked up on the tail-board.  For what his horses are to a driver and his eighteen-pounder to a gunner, such is his wagon to the A.S.C. man who is detailed to it.  It is his caravan.  Many a time, on long and lonely journeys from the Base to the Front, have I been cheered to find a Supply Column drawn up on the roadside in a wooded valley, on a bare undulating down, or in a chalk quarry, while the men were making tea over a blue wood fire.  If you love a gipsy life join the A.S.C.

Within this one-mile radius of the A.S.C. headquarters at the Base are some twenty military hospitals improvised out of hotels, gaming-houses, and railway waiting-rooms.  For the Base is the great Clearing House for the sick and wounded, and its register of patients is a kind of barometer of the state of affairs at the Front.  When that register sinks very low, it means that the atmospheric conditions at the Front are getting stormy,