The dump I best remember I visited on a wet and windy day.  Over a great space of ground the sidings of the rail-head spread, the normal gauge rail-head spread out like a fan and interdigitated with the narrow gauge lines that go up practically to the guns.  And also at the sides camions were loading, and an officer from the Midi in charge of one of these was being dramatically indignant at five minutes’ delay.  Between these two sets of lines, shells were piled of all sizes, I should think some hundreds of thousands of shells altogether, wet and shining in the rain.  French reservists, soldiers from Madagascar, and some Senegalese were busy at different points loading and unloading the precious freights.  A little way from me were despondent-looking German prisoners handling timber.  All this dump was no more than an eddy as it were in the path of the shell from its birth from the steel bars near Paris to the accomplishment of its destiny in the destruction or capture of more Germans.

And next the visitor meets the shell coming up upon a little trolley to the gun.  He sees the gunners, as drilled and precise as the men he saw at the forges, swing out the breech block and run the shell, which has met and combined with its detonators and various other industrial products since it left the main dump, into the gun.  The breech closes like a safe door, and hides the shell from the visitor.  It is “good-bye.”  He receives exaggerated warning of the danger to his ears, stuffs his fingers into them, and opens his mouth as instructed, hears a loud but by no means deafening report, and sees a spit of flame near the breech.  Regulations of a severe character prevent his watching from an aeroplane the delivery of the goods upon the customers opposite.

I have already described the method of locating enemy guns and so forth by photography.  Many of the men at this work are like dentists rather than soldiers; they are busy in carefully lit rooms, they wear white overalls, they have clean hands and laboratory manners.  The only really romantic figure in the whole of this process, the only figure that has anything of the old soldierly swagger about him still, is the aviator.  And, as one friend remarked to me when I visited the work of the British flying corps, “The real essential strength of this arm is the organisation of its repairs.  Here is one of the repair vans through which our machine guns go.  It is a motor workshop on wheels.  But at any time all this park, everything, can pack up and move forward like Barnum and Bailey’s Circus.  The machine guns come through this shop in rotation; they go out again, cleaned, repaired, made new again.  Since we got all that working we have heard nothing of a machine gun jamming in any air fight at all."...