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.