_*Chapter II*_ _*"AU REVOIR" TO ENGLAND*_ In the early stages of the War it was by no means uncommon for a man to enlist in the Army Service Corps in the afternoon and the same night find himself marching, in company with a good many others, into the Mechanical Transport Depot at Grove Park, singing "Tipperary." The following morning, having been put into khaki, he would be told off to a motor-lorry, on which he would chalk such cryptic remark as "London-Berlin Express." Later in the day he would be driving his lorry—one of a convoy of many similar vehicles—to ——, and a few hours after that he would be in France. This is not exactly what happened to the author; suffice it to add that in the first few days of August 1914 he enlisted, and on October 28th made the meteoric flight from private in a Territorial Battalion to a second-lieutenant in the Army Service Corps. On Sunday, November 15th, he had just come up from Grove Park to London on a few hours’ leave of absence from duty, when a telegram arrived. It read: "Return at once.—ADJUTANT." Having followed this order, he was packed off at once to Woolwich, and here found he was posted to the —— Indian Cavalry Division Supply Column. On Tuesday, the 17th, the column was due to leave Woolwich for —— and sail for France almost immediately after arrival at the port of embarkation. So on that morning we entrained; the motor-lorries and half the personnel had gone on by road the previous day. The same night we found ourselves at ——, ten officers and some 700 N.C.O.’s and men, the latter composed of lorry drivers and supply details, with roughly 160 motor-lorries and cars. Half the lorries were old buses off the London streets, but not of the usual "London General" appearance, for they had been converted from passenger to food and forage carrying vehicles by the substitution of van-shaped open bodies in place of the familiar bright red, two-decker bus bodies. I was destined to travel many thousands of miles on the front seat of many of these, and it has often occurred to me during the course of my journeys that perhaps the same buses that I have taken to Ypres have perhaps taken me on previous occasions, before the War, down Piccadilly or along the Strand, under entirely different circumstances. The remainder of the lorries were brand new Silent Knight Daimlers, and the carrying capacity of the majority of the lorries was thirty hundredweight. Painted grey-green service colour, they presented a sombre spectacle, "parked" in a long line along a straight open road just outside the docks. Besides the lorries for carrying supplies, we had the large, closed, high-bodied, portable workshop lorries, fitted with the essential tools—lathes, drilling-machines, and the like—driven by petrol-electric sets, to effect repairs to broken-down lorries in the field. Also the closed-in