AN ADVANCED RAILHEAD
At an advanced railhead one has to contend with other difficulties than that of the congestion of railway traffic, which is inevitable near the line. There are the French, who control all the traction. This includes the shunting: you must not forget the shunting. It's the shunting that kills. Your pack (pack is the technical term for supply-train) may arrive at railhead at 5 p.m.; but it may not be in position for clearance by divisions until midnight. This plays the devil with divisional transport. You advise them by telephone that their pack will arrive at railhead at 5: let them get their transport down. Transport arrives at 4.30, to be "on the safe side"; but it waits impatiently six and eight and ten hours to clear. Very hard on horses, this; almost as hard on lorry-drivers, if the division is clearing by mechanical transport. There is language used by drivers waiting thus for hours in the snow or the bitter wind. The language of a horse-transport driver is a very expressive thing; it has a directness that is admirable.
At —— the transport—and especially the horse transport—got tired of this system, if system it could be called. They got to the stage at which they posted an orderly at railhead to watch the shunting of packs with his own eyes. That orderly was not to move off until he not only saw the train arrive, but saw it in position too. Not until he returned to Headquarters with this doubtfully welcome news were the horses taken from their lines.
It's urgently necessary that packs should be "placed" early, for more reasons than one. But one is that the men in the line are depending on a prompt delivery of rations by the divisional transport. If, therefore, the pack arrives twenty-four hours late (as frequently it does), it is manifestly undesirable that the French should delay its clearance ten hours more. Another reason is that if you have four packs arriving in the day—as many railheads have—your cour de gare will not accommodate them all for clearance simultaneously; usually it will not accommodate more than two at once. For yours are not the only trains whose clearance is urgent: there are ammunition-trains, stone-trains for road-making, trains of guns and horses for disembarkation, trains stuffed with ordnance stores and canteen stores, trains of timber for the R.E.'s. The clearance of any is needed urgently at any railhead. The term "railhead," by the way, is interpreted somewhat foggily by the popular mind. There used to be a notion abroad that it connoted a railway terminus. That is, of course, not so. It does connote a point in the line convenient for clearance by divisions. There may be five railheads in eighty miles of line, and the last of them not a terminus. A railhead, therefore, because it is a point convenient, is inevitably busy.
If tardiness in despatch from the base or railroad congestion en route should congest your railhead suddenly, it may be necessary to indent for fatigue from the corps whose railhead yours is. Usually it is a night fatigue that must be requisitioned. Conceive the attitude of the fatigue that marches to railhead at 9 p.m. through the snow-slush, for eight hours' work. Conceive, also, the ingenuity with which, during operations, they secrete themselves in the nooks and crannies of supply-stacks, out of the bitter blast, until the rum issue is made. Half the energy of the N.C.O.'s is dissipated in keeping their disgusted mob up to strength. Conceive, too, the appropriation of "grub" that goes on in the bowels of these supply-stacks, and the cases of jam and veal-loaf dropped and burst by accident in transit. All-night fatigues that are borrowed are the very deuce.
The winter-night clearance at railhead goes on in the face of much difficulty and hardship. The congestion of transport in the yard is almost impossibly unwieldy: it moves in six-inch mud and in pitch darkness, except for the flares of the issuers, and except when there is neither rain nor snow, which is seldom. The cold is bitter and penetrating, so is the wind. Horses plunge in the darkness; drivers, loaders, and issuers curse; and to the laymen, who cannot be expected to see the system which does lie beneath this apparent chaos, it is miraculous that the clearance gets done at all.
The mistakes occur which are inevitable in the circumstances. The divisions clear by brigades. One brigade sometimes gets off with the rum or the fresh vegetable of another. Sometimes this is accidental, sometimes not. In any case it is a matter for internal adjustment by the division itself.
The adjustment of packs is a matter of extreme difficulty at the railhead of a corps whose troops are mobile. Any corps railhead in the Arras sector in March, 1917, furnished a good example of that. We were to push at Arras. This meant that reinforcements whose arrival it was difficult, if not impossible, to forecast, were constantly coming in and raising the strength of the divisions drawing. It takes three days for orders on the base increasing the packs to take effect at railhead. An increase of five thousand in ration strength may be effected at half a day's notice only. They must be fed. The pack is inadequate to this extent. The division must be sent to another railhead to complete, or to a field supply depôt, or to a reserve supply depôt. It may take them a day to collect their full ration. You immediately wire the base for an increase in pack. By the time the wire has taken effect at railhead, the reinforcements (in these mobile days of an advance) may have moved on beyond Arras; you have all your increase as surplus on your hands. They must be dumped, and the increase in pack cancelled. It's not impossible that, the day after you have cancelled it, you will have need of it for fresh unadvised arrivals.
The thaw restrictions in traffic hit very hard the clearance at railheads. For seven days during the thaw, such was the parlous softness of the roads, it was out of the question to permit general traffic in lorries. All the clearance must be done by horse transport, which, by comparison with M.T., is damnably slow. It delayed the clearance of trains by half-days. Divisions which had to trek by G.S. waggon to other railheads to complete were hard put to it to get their men in the line fed.