The thaw restrictions in traffic hit very hard the clearance at railheads. For seven days during the thaw, such was the parlous softness of the roads, it was out of the question to permit general traffic in lorries. All the clearance must be done by horse transport, which, by comparison with M.T., is damnably slow. It delayed the clearance of trains by half-days. Divisions which had to trek by G.S. waggon to other railheads to complete were hard put to it to get their men in the line fed. Units which had no horse transport available had been instructed beforehand to draw thaw and reserve rations to tide them over the period. They stuck to their quarters, and ate tinned beef and biscuit. But special dispensations had to be granted for traffic by lorries. When a coal-train arrived at railhead it was unthinkable to clear it by H.T. General Service waggons would take a week to clear four hundred tons of coal. Dispensations had to be granted for other urgent reasons. The cumulative effect was that of lorry traffic to a dangerous extent--dangerous because the frost bites so deep that when the thaw is at its height ruts are two feet deep. It bites down at the soft foundation beneath the cobble-stones of the village streets; and on the country roads the subsoil has no such protection as cobbles from the oppression of loaded lorries. But it was curious to see, in the villages, the cobbles rising _en masse_ like jelly either flank of the lorry, or rising like a wave in the wake of the lumbering thing. Lorries got ditched in the country roads beyond immediate deliverance by other lorries. Nothing less than a steam tractor could move them. A convoy of tractors was set aside in each road-area for no other purpose than to obey calls to the rescue of ditched lorries. Certain roads were so badly cut that they had to be closed to traffic of any kind: motor-cycle with side-car that ventured on was bogged. The personnel of the road-control was increased twenty-fold to check speeds and to indicate prohibited roads. The worst tracts of the roads in use were so bad as to be paved with double rows of railway sleepers until the frost had worked out. Some roads will never recover; they will have to be closed until remade.