Indubitably it is the perfection of transportation. Napoleon said, or is supposed to have said, that an army, like a snake, moves on its belly. The truth is, of course, that the art of war is, as to six-sevenths of it, the art of carrying heavy things from one place to another. You have got to move obvious necessaries, such as food and fuel and housing-timber and spare clothes; and human frames--that to marching men are heavier at the end of a long day than anything in the world; and rifles, bayonets and bombs, the ultimate _ratio decidendi_ of all operations; and shells that look like death, and weigh as much as a model bungalow; and frowning Frankensteins of guns that look like the Day of Judgment, and weigh as much as a small foundry; and the wounded who come back with the Cross, steeped in blood, to stand as a fit symbol of their sacrifice. But you must move a great deal that is less obvious and more necessary. When you export an army such as ours, which is in reality a nation and not a small one, you must send with it a government. Now knowledge, and the administrative body in which it expresses itself, is of all things the most difficult to export. This scheme of transportation is the first miracle of sheer brain-power that strikes you, but it is not the greatest. I do not scruple to say that as a study in government, that is to say, in the efficient conduct of human things in the mass, the present army, as organised through G.H.Q., is far more impressive than most civil constitutions. I do not speak merely of the actual Higher Command. Your heads of that must carry all the apparatus of all its range from minor tactics to military statesmanship. Note, rather, then, when you send an army you must send a Treasury, a General Post Office, a Judiciary and Record Office, and one hardly knows what beside. Your quartermaster-general has got to be the Selfridge of six million gaily grumbling customers, who are perpetually on the move. A mere battalion quartermaster must possess qualities that would win a fortune in a large suburban shop. And it is possible to overlook the service of information--the signallers. Everywhere the army goes it lays behind it a tentacular network of news-carrying wire. The arm of its reporting power is indefinitely longer than that of any Associated Press. From the company dug-out in the front trench to Sir Douglas Haig, and from him to Whitehall, there is no gap. On the earth, beneath it and above, this nerve-system extends: aeroplane, observation balloon, patrol, vedette, sniping-post, all collect their varying toll of fact and surmise; electricity, drilled to the use of the men who wear the blue-and-white bands, vibrates it on to its destination. And so is this particular area of the army cerebrum kept alive and alert. I have hardly spoken of the A.S.C., of the endless chain of supply that for ever runs and returns on its infallible cogs about the roads and railways.