A.V.C. corporal, and a khaki-painted motor-bus crowded with drafts for
the Front. Big ocean liners, flying the Red Cross, lie at their
moorings, and lofty electric cranes gyrate noiselessly over supply ships
unloading their stores, while animated swarms of dockers in khaki pile
up a great ant-heap of sacks in the sheds with a passionless
concentration that seems like the workings of blind instinct. And here
are warehouses whose potentialities of wealth are like Mr. Thrale's
brewery--wheat, beef, fodder, and the four spices dear to the delicate
palates of the Indian contingent. Somewhere behind there is a park of
ammunition guarded like a harem. In the railway sidings are duplicate
supply trains, steam up, trucks sealed, and the A.S.C. officer on board
ready to start for rail-head with twenty-four hours' supplies. Beyond
the maze of "points" is moored the strangest of all rolling-stock, the
grey-coated armoured-train, within whose iron walls are domesticated two
amphibious petty officers darning their socks.

In huge offices improvised out of deal boarding Army Service Corps
officers are docketing stupendous files of way-bills, loading-tables,
and indents, what time the Railway Transport Officer is making up his
train of trucks for the corresponding supplies. The A.S.C. uses up more
stationery than all the departments in Whitehall, and its motto is
_litera scripta manet_--which has been explained by an A.S.C. sergeant,
instructing a class of potential officers, as meaning "Never do anything
without a written order, but, whatever you do, never write one." For an
A.S.C. court of inquiry has as impassioned a preference for written over
oral evidence as the old Court of Chancery. So that if your way-bill
testifies:


Truck No. Contents