we could get food!

Our next journey took us to the greatest training camp in the
allied part of the world. It is not the largest camp, of course.
It accommodates less than twenty thousand soldiers. But it is what
might be called the post graduate college of all training camps.
Here ten thousand men come every week from other training camps
all over the earth, and are given intensive training. For six days,
eighteen and twenty hours a day, these soldiers, trained by many
months' labour on other fields, are given the Ph.D. in battle lore,
and are turned out the seventh day after a Saturday night lecture
on hate, and shot straight up to the front. In all France there is
no more grisly place for the weak-stomached man than this training
camp--not even the front line trenches will kick up his gorge more
sedulously. Yet at first sight the place looks innocent enough.
One sees a great basin hollowed among the hills, and in the ten
thousand acre plain one sees horse-men galloping, soldiers running,
great trucks and tanks lumbering over the field; men digging, men
throwing hand-grenades, men clambering over trench walls, stumbling
over crater holes, men doing all the innumerable things that are
learned by those who carry on the handicraft of war.

But when one starts with the first class and goes along through
the day's work with it, the deadly seriousness of the training gets
to him. The first thing the first class does is to gather around a
sergeant major, who in a few simple words tells his pupils how to
use the bayonet. Then they go out and use the bayonet as he has
taught them. Then the pupils gather around another sergeant major,
who tells them how to use the hand-grenade or the knife or the butt
of a gun, and the simple-hearted lads go out and use the grenade,