This poor material, dirty, rusty, even blood-stained, is sorted out at the salvage dump and sent down to the base by train. We saw one of these trains arrive at Calais, and we were able to see some of the ingenious devices invented for dealing with this curious hotch-potch. All this takes place in an old sawmill, which has been enlarged to five times its natural size since the beginning of the war. A thousand skilled British workers and two thousand French women are now employed in the workshops. Most of the women are, in normal times, lacemakers in the town. The men, skilled labourers in uniform, work by time, not by the piece. They earn eighteenpence a day--i.e., 6d. more than the ordinary Tommy in the trenches. The women, of all ages, are used for light and not very exhausting work, and they earn on the average 3 francs a day (the trades-union price). What miracles take place! In the "snob-shop," the ammunition boots, glorious souvenirs of the front, which come back in a shocking state, are examined and repaired. Twenty thousand pairs a week. The hopeless pairs are made into laces. One woman can make 150 per day. At the saddlery, harness and leather, covered with mud and blood, are cleaned as good as new. At the forge, wheels and couplings of gun-carriages are repaired. Elsewhere the essential parts of the guns are examined and all missing sections replaced. In another place the dixies and camp-cookers, all dented and rusty, are cleaned and re-soldered. Old petrol tins are made into trench braziers. Steel helmets recover their form, picks and shovels their handles, and all the iron that cannot be made use of is sent back to the foundry to be melted down for ammunition. Over the door of this war factory might be inscribed the motto of Lavoisier, with a slight addition:-- "Here nothing new is made, but nothing old is wasted." The science that is taught and practised is the science, hitherto too little known, of economy. That is the reason why many men of the world (and others) should, like us, visit this base. CHAPTER VII "BROTHERS IN ARMS." _The Times_, through the medium of its distinguished representative with the British Army, Mr. Robinson, has recently published a very laudatory and somewhat flattering article on the attitude of the French soldier and the civil population of France towards the British Expeditionary Force. "It must not be forgotten," said the great journal of the metropolis, "that we are foreigners in France. Thus the spectacle of good-comradeship which we witness every day is altogether honourable to our French hosts." We must be allowed to say in our turn that never before has it been so easy to practise the military virtue of comradeship, for my countrymen are fully alive to the tact and perfect courtesy of the officers and men of King George.