death--death in youth, at the height of life.

The boot and uniform sheds, where 500 French women and girls, under
soldier-foremen, are busy, the harness-mending room, and the engineering
workshops might reassure those pessimists among us--especially of my own
sex--who think that the male is naturally and incorrigibly a wasteful
animal. Colonel D. shows me the chart which is the record of his work, and
its steadily mounting efficiency. He began work with 140 men, he is now
employing more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving
thousands of pounds a week to the British Government. He makes all his own
power, and has four or five powerful dynamos at work.

We come out into a swirl of snow, and henceforward sightseeing is
difficult. Yet we do our best to defy the weather. We tramp through the
deepening snow of the great camp, which lines the slopes of the hills
above the river and the town, visiting its huts and recreation-rooms, its
Cinema theatre, and its stores, and taking tea with the Colonel of an
Infantry Base Depot, who is to be our escort on the morrow.

But on the last morning before we start we mount to the plateau above the
reinforcement camp, where the snow lies deep and the wind blows one of the
sharpest blasts of the winter. Here are bodies of men going through some
of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front; here are
trenches of all kinds and patterns, revetted in ways new and old, and
planned according to the latest experience brought from the fighting line.
The instructors here, as at other training-camps in France, are all men
returned from the front. The men to whom they have to give the final touch
of training--men so near themselves to the real thing--are impatient of
any other sort.