In the knowledge of this happy circumstance, the country may indeed congratulate itself, for not only did the London and North-Western Railway perform its allotted task at home, but, as will now be seen, the staff of the Company's locomotive department at Crewe further succeeded by their "incessant toil" in rendering a very large proportion of that material aid, without which the "rearward services" of our overseas forces could never, in their turn, have enabled the fighting men at the front to bring the war to a successful conclusion.
[CHAPTER XI]
INDISPENSABLE
"With the rearward services rests victory or defeat."
Sir Douglas Haig.
In the preceding chapter we have been able to digest a few of the more interesting facts and figures gleaned, in the one case from Sir Douglas Haig's final dispatch, and having reference to the task performed by the rearward services of the British Army in France; in the other, from the two reports issued by Mr. L. W. Horne, and dealing with the working of the London and North-Western Railway in the interests of the State, at home.
Most of us will probably retain some recollection of the scriptural parable of the virgins, five of whom were wise, and five foolish. Whilst hardly being perhaps quite fair to liken the rearward services of the Army to the latter five, who, lacking oil in their lamps, begged the necessary illuminant from the former, the London and North-Western Railway Company's locomotive department may nevertheless be said to resemble the wise virgins, in that, figuratively speaking, lamps were kept trimmed and full of oil, ready for any emergency; not only this, however, but going one better than the wise virgins, who, seemingly a trifle selfish and stony-hearted, turned a deaf ear to their foolish sisters in distress, the London and North-Western Railway locomotive department never hesitated to extend a helping hand to the rearward services of the Army, rendering possible in part that "wonderful development of all methods of transportation," which, as Sir Douglas Haig avers, "had an important influence upon the course of events."
We have noted the extent of the goods traffic which was dealt with at home during the fateful years of the world war, and of which the mileage rose from eighteen and a half millions in 1914 to no less a figure than twenty and a half millions in 1917, and it was during this period, when Mr. Bowen-Cooke, in his capacity as chief mechanical engineer of the premier British railway company, was concentrating his endeavours on the maintenance of a supply of locomotive power sufficient to cope with this ever-increasing figure, that he was called upon to assist in that other and extraneous supply of similar power, by means of which the rearward services of our overseas forces were enabled to solve the immense problem of transportation by rail in the various theatres of war in which we were engaged, a problem which as we know, ultimately involved on the Western Front in France alone the running of "a weekly average of 1,800 trains, carrying a weekly average load of approximately 400,000 tons."