barbed wire--by the ton; trenching-tools, wheelbarrows, pickaxes, razors,
sand-bags, knives, screws, shovels, picketing-pegs, and the like--they are
of course endless; and the men who work in them are housed in one of the
largest sheds, in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Depot to the outsider are the
repairing sheds and workshops established in a suburb of the town to which
we drive on. For this is work that has never been done before in
connection with an army in the field. Day by day trains full of articles
for repair come down from the front. I happened to see a train of the
kind, later on, leaving a station close to the fighting line. Guns,
rifles, range-finders, gun-carriages, harness, all torn and useless
uniforms, tents, boots by the thousand, come to this base to be repaired,
or to be sent home for transformation into "shoddy" to the Yorkshire
towns. Nothing seems too large or too small for Colonel D.'s department.
Field-glasses, periscopes, water-bottles, they arrive from the trenches
with the same certainty as a wounded howitzer or machine-gun, and are
returned as promptly.

In one shed, my guide called my attention to shelves on which were a
number of small objects in china and metal. "They were found in kits left
on the field," he says gently. "Wherever we can identify the owner, such
things are carefully returned to his people. These could not be
identified."

I took up a little china dog, a bit of coarse French pottery, which some
dead father had bought, at Poperinghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for the
children at home. Near by were "souvenirs"--bits of shell, of German
equipment; then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck-medallion of a
saint--and so on--every fragment steeped in the poignancy of sudden