The military camps of Great Britain tell the tale of our incredible venture. "Great areas of land had to be cleared, levelled, and drained; barracks had to be built; one camp alone used 42,000 railway truck-loads of building material." There was no time to build new railways, and the existing roads were rapidly worn out. They were as steadily repaired; and on every side new camps sprang up around the parent camps of the country.
The Surrey commons and woods, the Wiltshire downs, the Midland and Yorkshire heaths, the Buckinghamshire hills have been everywhere invaded—their old rural sanctities are gone. I walked in bewilderment the other day up and down the slopes of a Surrey hill which when I knew it last was one kingdom of purple heather, beloved of the honey-bees, and scarcely ever trodden by man or woman. Barracks now form long streets upon its crest and sides; practise-trenches, bombing-schools, the stuffed and dangling sacks for bayonet training, musketry ranges, and the rest, are everywhere. Tennyson, whose wandering ground it once was, would know it no more. And this camp is only one of a series which spread far and wide round the Aldershot headquarters.
Near my own home, a park and a wooded hillside, that two years ago were carefully guarded even from a neighbour's foot, are now occupied by a large town of military huts, which can be seen for miles round. And fifteen miles away, in a historic "chase" where Catharine of Aragon lived while her trial was proceeding in a neighbouring town, a duke, bearing one of the great names of England, has himself built a camp, housing 1,200 men, for the recruits of his county regiments alone, and has equipped it with every necessary, whether for the soldier's life or training. But everywhere—East, North, South, and West—the English and Scotch roads are thronged with soldiers and horses, with trains of artillery wagons and Army Service lorries, with men marching back from night attacks or going out to scout and skirmish on the neighbouring commons and through the most sacred game—preserves. There are no more trespass laws in England—for the soldier.
You point to our recruiting difficulties in Parliament. True enough. We have our recruiting difficulties still. Lord Derby has not apparently solved the riddle; for riddle it is, in a country of voluntary service, where none of the preparations necessary to fit conscription into ordinary life, with its obligations, have ever been made. The Government and the House of Commons are just now wrestling with it afresh, and public opinion seems to be hardening towards certain final measures that would have been impossible earlier in the war.[B] The call is still for men—more—and more—men! And given the conditions of this war, it is small wonder that England is restless till they are found. But amid the cross currents of criticism, I catch the voice of Mr. Walter Long, the most practical, the least boastful of men, in the House of Commons, a few nights ago: Say what you like, blame, criticise, as you like, but "what this country has done since August, 1914, is an almost incredible story." And so it is.
And now let us follow some of these khaki-clad millions across the seas, through the reinforcement camps, and the great supply bases, towards that fierce reality of war to which everything tends.
[B] Since these lines were written the crisis in the Government, the Irish rising, and the withdrawal of the military service bill have happened in quick succession. The country is still waiting (April 28th) for the last inevitable step.
II
It was about the middle of February, after my return from the munition factories, that I received a programme from the War Office of a journey in France, which I was to be allowed to make. I remember being at first much dissatisfied with it. It included the names of three or four places well known to be the centres of English supply organisation in France. But it did not include any place in or near the actual fighting zone. To me, in my ignorance, the places named mainly represented the great array of finely equipped hospitals to be found everywhere in France in the rear of our Armies; and I was inclined to say that I had no special knowledge of hospital work, and that one could see hospitals in England, with more leisure to feel and talk with the sufferers in them than a ten days' tour could give. A friendly Cabinet Minister smiled when I presented this view. "You had better accept. You will find it very different from what you suppose. The 'back' of the Army includes everything." He was more than right!
The conditions of travelling at the present moment, within the region covered by the English military organisation in France, for a woman possessing a special War Office pass, in addition to her ordinary passport, and understood to be on business which has the good-will of the Government, though in no sense commissioned by it, are made easy by the courtesy and kindness of everybody concerned. From the moment of landing on the French side, my daughter and I passed into the charge of the military authorities. An officer accompanied us; a War Office motor took us from place to place; and everything that could be shown us in the short ten days of our tour was freely open to us. The trouble, indeed, that was taken to enable me to give some of the vividness of personal seeing to these letters is but one of many proofs, I venture to think, of that warm natural wish in British minds that America should understand why we are fighting this war, and how we are fighting it. As to myself, I have written in complete freedom, affected only by the absolutely necessary restrictions of the military censorship; and I only hope I may be able to show something, however inadequately, of the work of men who have done a magnificent piece of organisation, far too little realised even in their own country.
For in truth we in England know very little about our bases abroad; about what it means to supply the ever-growing needs of the English Armies in France. The military world takes what has been done for granted; the general English public supposes that the Tommies, when their days in the home camps are done, get "somehow" conveyed to the front, being "somehow" equipped, fed, clothed, nursed, and mended, and sent on their way across France in interminable lines of trains. As to the details of the process, it rarely troubles its head. The fact is, however, that the work of the great supply bases abroad, of the various Corps and Services connected with them—Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, railway and motor transport—is a desperately interesting study; and during the past eighteen months, under the "I.G.C."—Inspector-General of Communications—has developed some of the best brains in the Army.