Certainly there is much to unload. An army carries as much personal baggage as a prima donna. Observe these wharves. Here are great naval guns—fourteen-inch. They are like millionaires, because each requires a private railway train of its own. In fact they are super-millionaires, because each requires a private track as well. There are great motor-lorries, some from America, some from England. There is a fleet of rolling kitchens—or “soup-guns,” as the Doughboy calls them-awaiting horse-traction. At present they are hitched one behind another like a string of ducks, and are attached to a road engine for transference to the forward areas. There are mighty Mogul locomotives, shipped bodily from the United States, together with the appurtenances thereof—even that mysterious tolling bell on top of the boiler.
The American locomotive bell impresses Europeans enormously. They wonder what it is for. On the whole they regard it with reverence; it confers a sort of ecclesiastical sanctity upon American railroad travel. A Scotsman once told me that whenever he visited America he used frequently to wake up in the sleeping-car, standing in some great railroad junction in the small hours, under the firm impression that he was back in his native town on a Sunday morning.
As for the ordinary military stores, they come in one unceasing cataract. Gasoline tanks; water-tanks; cold-storage carcasses; bags of flour; canned meat; canned fruit; bales of clothing; consignments of tobacco; chewing-gum, books, and other comforts. Liberty motors; aeroplanes; machine guns; spare parts. The dingy, oddly painted ships come sliding down from the horizon, deposit them all in mountain ranges upon dock and wharf, then turn round and steal back to America for more.
Shells are not landed here. They are touchy and inflammable folk, and have a private and exclusive place of debarkation of their own, higher up the river.
But there is human freight to be deposited too. Here are two liners, newly docked. Each, despite her great size, is heeling over towards the wharf, as the biggest ships will when the whole cargo hangs over one side. One cargo is white, the other coloured.
“Where yo’ from?” shrieks a stevedore, to the dusky grinning human mountain above him.
“Seventy fo’, Fo’teen Street, Lebanon, Illinois!” pipes a solitary voice far up the height, before any one else can answer the question. There is a roar of laughter at this egotism, and another voice from the wharf enquires:
“What camp?”
“Camp Dodge! Labour Battalion!” roars an answering chorus.
“Step right down, boys! We got lots of labour for you heah!” yells the humorist on the wharf.