The enormously increased importance of artillery in this war necessitates not only an unlimited supply of ammunition, but more and more new guns of the latest and heaviest types, besides the requisite increase of transport. The enormous output of ammunition from the factories in England demands extended storage accommodation at the base, and a larger service of trains for conveying the supplies from the base to the railheads at the front. The motor-lorries which bring the shell to the gun, the bullet to the rifle, the bomb to the grenadier, must be increased in number to cope with the augmented supplies. Thus, wherever you turn, whether towards the men of the new army flocking out from England, or towards the guns that are to blast for them the path to victory, you are confronted by the same process of expansion which is developing the little Expeditionary Force of Mons and the Marne into the great army upon which--who knows?--may eventually devolve the final task of liberating Europe. CHAPTER XIV CHILDREN OF THE RAJ War in its old guise, the clash of warring Kings and their levies of horse and foot, with victory on the side of the stoutest blows, and triumph reckoned by the number of slain and spoils, may have faded from the European mind, but it still lingers, a brave and picturesque adventure, in the storied imagination of the East. So it happens that, of all the forces in the field to-day, none has a more knightly conception of war, as the word was understood in the days of chivalry, than the levies which India has sent to Europe to fight for the British Raj. How old John Froissart, who loved a brave spectacle of war, would have thrilled to see the stately Sikh horsemen, as I have seen them, high turbans and tall lances silhouetted against an evening sky, defiling along a road in Flanders, trod in bygone days by many of the old chronicler’s heroes--Edward of Wales, Sir Reginald Lord Cobham, Sir Walter Manny, Sir John Chandos, and the rest! How gladly he would have wandered into their camps and bivouacs, and heard from bearded Sikh and lean Pathan the stirring story of their military past, heard them speak again in the manner of his time of the great war between the Kings of Europe!