The result is to facilitate operations of troops up to a distance from railhead represented by half of a full day’s work for the motors. The simplest way of appreciating the result obtained is to take an actual example. Under the new system, on, let us say, Tuesday evening, the soldier at the front is provided with a hot meal of fresh meat, cooked by the regimental travelling kitchens on the march. This food had been handed over to the kitchens on Monday evening by the distributing horsed vehicles, which had received it sometime during Monday at the re-filling point a few miles back from the motor supply column, which had left railhead perhaps 50 miles from the front in the small hours of Monday morning. Previously, the supplies had been brought down by rail from the base, and in this way the food which the soldiers are eating on Tuesday night, was probably to be found in the neighbourhood of the base on Sunday afternoon in the shape of live animals.
Working out the scheme from a rather different point of view, the soldier on the Tuesday night is in possession of Wednesday’s supply of bread and cheese, and an emergency ration of preserved meat in case of any delays or breakdown in the transport service. The horsed vehicles are at the time empty, and are returning to meet the motors at re-filling point. The motors by this time are back at railhead waiting for Wednesday’s supplies to be discharged from the railway trains. At about three o’clock on Wednesday morning the motors will be loaded and ready to start. Their speed capacity will enable them easily to catch up with the distributing horsed vehicles before the end of Wednesday’s march, and to tranship their supplies at re-filling point for distribution on Wednesday evening.
The whole system is, in reality, very simple, and it enables large armies in the field to be supplied daily with fresh meat and bread instead of being dependent on food brought up slowly and in many stages, and for that reason necessarily of a character less nutritious, and much more liable in the long run to cause illness among the men. At the same time, the big carrying capacity of the motor has served to clear the roads behind the army of an enormous block of vehicles essential in the past, but now no longer necessary. In connection with this point, Colonel R. H. Ewart, D.S.O., representing the Indian Office at the Imperial Motor Transport Conference of 1913, gave some very interesting figures, which may be quoted as an extreme case:
“Up to 1910 the reports show that there were nearly five-and-a-half million bullock carts in British India alone, and in all our wars up to date, we have had to mobilise a very large number of these carts for our line of communication work. We find that when moving in large bodies, the utmost speed we can rely upon is about one-and-a-half miles an hour. We have worked out that it takes six bullock carts to move in eighty days what one 2-ton lorry can transport in ten. The bullock carts take up twice the room on the road for a given load, and in the matter of establishment—a question which you will all realise in the time of war is a very serious one—it takes thirty-five men, drivers, artificers and supervisors to look after what one man could do with a lorry.”
From these figures it will be seen what an enormous saving is effected by the use of motors, even if we only take the point of view of the feeding, maintenance and payment of the men actually employed in the transport columns themselves.
The impossibility of imposing upon horsed vehicles the necessity for gaining fifty or even thirty miles in the course of a day, in order to catch up by the evening with an advancing army after leaving railhead in the morning, is perfectly obvious. The truth of the statement already made that the use of motors for transport and supply work is a necessity and not merely a convenience in modern warfare, is thus made clear, and under the circumstances, readers who are perhaps more attracted by the more showy, but less essential, uses of motors in war, will understand that a consideration of the subject of this book must necessarily be devoted very largely to the organisation and matériel of the supply columns.
The class of vehicle most commonly favoured for the work of feeding troops in the field is the 3-ton petrol lorry, capable of covering eighty or ninety miles in a day, and if need be of travelling under fairly favourable conditions at twenty miles an hour. Behind very mobile troops, such as cavalry, preference is sometimes given to lighter lorries rated to carry 30 cwt. or 2 tons, and capable of rather higher rates of speed and rather bigger daily mileages. Some European Powers favour for general work lorries carrying 4 or 5 tons, and in addition capable of drawing an extra 2 tons or so upon a trailer. In every case, the internal combustion vehicle is preferred on account of its independence upon frequent renewals of fuel and water supplies. However, steam tractors are often used for various classes of specially heavy work, as, for example, for drawing the travelling workshops which have to be established at the movable base of the supply columns at railhead.