The presence, at every important link in the chain of rail communication, of a Commission designed to secure regularity and efficiency in the traffic arrangements should avoid confusion, congestion and delay.
The association, on each of these Commissions, of the military and technical elements, with a strict definition of their respective powers, duties and responsibilities, should ensure the best use of the available transport facilities under conditions in themselves practicable, and without the risk either of friction between the representatives of the two interests or, alternatively, of any interference with the railway services owing to contradictory or impossible orders being given by individual officers acting on their own responsibility.
The setting up of the supply depôts and regulating stations along the line of communication should prevent (i) the rushing through of supplies in excessive quantities to the extreme front; (ii) the congestion of railway lines and stations; (iii) the undue accumulation of provisions at one point, with a corresponding deficiency elsewhere, and (iv) the possibility of large stocks being eventually seized by the enemy and made use of by him to his own advantage.
The measures adopted both to prevent any excessive employment of railway wagons as storehouses on wheels and to secure their prompt unloading should afford a greater guarantee of the best utilisation of rolling stock under conditions of, possibly, extreme urgency.
Finally, the unification of control, the co-ordination of the many different services involved, and the harmony of working established between all the various sections on the line of communication linking up the interior of the country with the troops in the fighting line should assure, not only the nearest possible approach to complete efficiency in the transport conditions, but the conferring of great advantages on the armies concerned, with a proportionate increase of their strength in the field.
The effect of all these things on the military position of France must needs be great. Had France controlled a rail-transport organisation such as this—instead of none at all—in 1870-71; and had Germany controlled a system no better than what we have seen to be the admittedly imperfect one she put into operation on that occasion, the results of the Franco-German war and the subsequent course of events in Europe might alike have been wholly different.
Tests of what were being planned or projected in France as precautionary measures, for application in war, could not, of course, be carried out exhaustively in peace; but many parts of the machinery designed came into daily use as a matter of ordinary routine. Full advantage was taken, also, of whatever opportunities did present themselves—in the form of exercises in partial mobilisation, reviews, and other occasions involving the movement by rail of large bodies of troops—to effect such trials as were possible of regulations and instructions already based on exhaustive studies by the military and railway authorities. In 1892 the results attained were so satisfactory that a German authority, Lieutenant Becker, writing in his book on "Der nächste Krieg und die deutschen Bahnverwaltungen," (Hanover, 1893,) concerning the trials in France, in that year, of the new conditions introduced by the law of December 28, 1888, was not only greatly impressed thereby but even appeared disposed to think that the French were becoming superior to the Germans in that very organisation which the latter had regarded as their own particular province. The following passages from his book may be worth recalling:—
Towards the middle of September, 1892, from a military railway station improvised for the occasion, there were sent off in less than eight hours forty-two trains conveying a complete Army Corps of 25,000 men.
In their famous mobilisation test of 1887 the French despatched from the Toulouse station 150 military trains without interrupting the ordinary traffic, and without any accident.
Such figures speak a significant language. They show what enormous masses of troops the railway can carry in the course of a few hours to a given point....
If I have referred to the results obtained by our neighbours on their railway systems, it is not because I have the least fear as to the final issue of the next war. Quite the contrary; but the fact does not prevent me from asking why the German Army cannot base on the railways of that country the same hopes which neighbouring countries are able to entertain in regard to theirs.
The favourable impression thus given, even to a German critic, by the progress France was making in her creation, not so much de novo as ab ovo, of a system of organised military rail-transport, were confirmed by many subsequent trials, experiments and experiences, all, in turn, leading to further improvements in matters of detail; but it was, indeed, the "nächste Krieg" concerning which Lieutenant Becker wrote that was to be the real test of the organisation which, during more than forty years of peace, France followed up with a zeal, a pertinacity and a thoroughness fully equal to those of Germany herself.