At least, it can be said for these men that their job is not of their own seeking, and that they volunteered, many of them in the first weeks of the war, for "active service," having no definite idea at all as to what they would encounter and what was in store. Although they are members of a combatant corps, opportunities for gallant actions and distinctions seldom come their way. Lord Northcliffe has described them as "The Army behind the Army." Such are the men of the administrative branches of the Service, who deal with thousands of tons of every imaginable material daily, from the time it is off-loaded from the ships at seaport supply bases such as Rouen, Le Havre, Calais, etc., up to its actual issue to the fighting troops at the front. Thus their operations extend from the bases to within a few hundred yards of the trenches, the interest and excitement of their work increasing proportionately with its distance from the former. It is of the doings of some of these men that I have endeavoured to write a description, and the following pages contain an account of my experiences with the British Expeditionary Force, chiefly incidents in my particular appointment during 1914, ’15, ’16 and ’17, as an Army Service Corps officer in the Mechanical Transport Supply Column of an Indian Cavalry Division. This book does not pretend to be an historical record of the doings of the unit to which I have been attached during this period, but merely a few sketches, written at random at various times, of incidents that have occurred in the course of duty with the largest mechanical transport unit (except the Base Mechanical Transport Depots and Workshops) of the British Expeditionary Force in France. Incidentally, these experiences have been unusually varied; though many is the time when they have appeared to be exactly the opposite. Nevertheless, the unit of which I write has consistently "rationed" its troops at almost every part of the British line, from Ypres to the River Somme, not to mention the places far behind the line where cavalry have been billeted during the winters and other periods of enforced inactivity. Looking at the map of the Western front war zone and drawing on it roughly a rectangle, having for its four angular points Boulogne and Ypres in the North and Rouen and Péronne in the South, there is, in this area, scarcely a town through which, or a main road over which, motor-lorries of the Supply Column have not travelled in their many journeys, covering thousands of miles, during the last two and a half years, up and down this strange land of "somewheres."