It is a colossal business to supply over 200,000 healthy men, with field and mountain appetites, when they are 7,000 miles away from home, and where there is an active enemy seeking to destroy their communications. It would be a great task to feed that number of men at home, where there is no difficulty in transportation; but when a month’s time must be occupied for the delivery of the food stuffs, the problem becomes most serious. [Illustration: Camp of a transport train in General French’s supply column.] The quartermaster’s department of the British army has to provide the rations for the men and forage for the animals; besides this, it is called upon to furnish the transportation of the food stuffs, as well as of the army itself. The paymaster’s work is also included in this department. After the quartermaster’s department has put the supplies on the ground, it falls to the lot of the Army Service Corps to deliver it to the various commands in the field. The Army Service Corps is one of the features of the British army which American authorities would do well to study. It is an armed and drilled commissary corps, of about 4,000 officers and men, which handles the entire work of that branch; but it is a fighting corps as well, when occasion requires. This last feature is of great value, in that it does away with the necessity of a detachment of men being drawn off as a special guard for every wagon or two. The Army Service Corps acts as its own convoy where only an ordinary one is required. When on home duty, it presents a spirited appearance, with a military aspect fully equal to that of the artillery. Its wagons and mounts are of the same type as those of the artillery, and its general equipment is similar. This corps is one of the few departments that has done well its entire duty during the South African campaign. The reason is obvious--there was no theory regarding the appetite of a robust soldier; it was a solemn fact, just as evident at Aldershot or on Salisbury Plain as in the field. It has been just as real in Egypt or India during the past years of peace as at the present moment at the Cape. The British soldier ate as heartily when he was fighting fanatic dervishes as when he fights the Boer; consequently that department was not compelled on the field to test antiquated methods or to experiment with new theories, only to find them wrong.