Hence you have to imagine wide steady streams of all manner of
things converging upon Northern France not only from Britain but
from round about the globe. The force of an imperative demand
draws them powerfully in, night and day, as a magnet might. It is
impossible to trace exactly either the direction or the separate
constituents of these great streams of necessaries. But it is possible
to catch them, or at any rate one of them, at the most interesting
point of its course: the point at which the stream, made up of many
converging streams, divides suddenly and becomes many streams
again.

That point is the rail-head.

Now, a military rail-head is merely an ordinary average little railway
station, with a spacious yard. There is nothing superficially romantic
about it. It does not even mark the end of a line of railway. I have in
mind one which served as the Head-quarters of a Divisional Supply
Column. The organism served just one division--out of the very
many divisions in France and Flanders. It was under the command
of a Major. This Major, though of course in khaki and employing the
same language and general code as a regimental Major, was not a
bit like a regimental Major. He was no more like a regimental Major
than I am myself. He had a different mentality, outlook,
preoccupation. He was a man in business. He received orders--I
use the word in the business sense--from the Brigades of the
Division; and those orders, ever varying, had to be executed and
delivered within thirty-six hours. Quite probably he had never seen a
trench; I should be neither surprised nor pained to learn that he
could only hit a haystack with a revolver by throwing the revolver at
the haystack. His subordinates resembled him. Strategy, artillery-