How we grudged the snow and the low-sweeping clouds and the closed motor, on our drive of the next day! I remember little more of it than occasional glimpses of the tall cliffs that stand sentinel along the river, a hasty look at a fine church above a steeply built town, an army lorry stuck deep in the snow-drifts, and finally the quays and ships of another base port. Our escort, Colonel S., pilots us to a pleasant hotel full of officers, mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communications, with a few poor wives and mothers among them who have come over to nurse their wounded in one or other of the innumerable hospitals of the base. Before dinner the general commanding the base had found me out and I had told my story. "Oh, we'll put some notes together for you. We were up most of last night. I dare say we shall be up most of this. But a little more or less doesn't matter." I protested most sincerely. But it is always the busiest men who shoulder the extra burdens; and the notes duly reached me. From them, from the talk of others spending their last ounce of brain and energy in the service of the base, and from the evidence of my own eyes, let me try and draw some general picture of what that service is: Suppose a British officer speaking: Remember first that every man, every horse, every round of ammunition, every article of clothing and equipment, all the guns and vehicles, and nearly all the food have to be brought across the English Channel to maintain and reinforce the ever-growing British Army, which holds now so important a share of the fighting line in France. The ports of entry are already overtaxed by the civil and military needs of France herself. Imagine how difficult it is--and how the difficulty grows daily with the steady increase of the British Army--to receive, disembark, accommodate, and forward the multitude of men and the masses of material! You see the khaki in the French streets, the mingling everywhere of French and English; but the ordinary visitor can form no idea of the magnitude of this friendly invasion. There is no formal delimitation of areas or spaces, in docks, or town, or railways. But gradually the observer will realise that the town is honeycombed with the temporary locations of the British Army, which everywhere speckle the map hanging in the office of the Garrison Quartermaster. And let him further visit the place where the long lines of reinforcement, training and hospital camps are installed on open ground, and old England's mighty effort will scarcely hide itself from the least intelligent. _Work, efficiency, economy_ must be the watchwords of a base. Its functions may not be magnificent--_but they are war_--and war is impossible unless they are rightly carried out.