Here is yet another example, connected with the transport. A troop train is a very long train, and it is packed close with men. For the transport of animals and of material objects every inch of space available is calculated and used. Well, to move one Army Corps alone (without the cavalry) you must allow over 180 such trains. Now, even at the origin of the war, upon one front alone, before the numbers had fully developed, the German invasion involved at least twenty-five Army Corps.
Such an appreciation of the scale and the pace of supply is sufficient to illuminate one’s third point, the delicacy of the whole business, and the peril of its embarrassment. You are feeding, munitioning, clothing, evacuating the wounded from, sheltering, and equipping millions of men; those millions subject to sudden abnormal periods of wastage, any one of which may come at any unexpected moment, and further subject to sudden unforeseen movements upon any scale. You must so co-ordinate all your movements of supply that no part of the vast line is pinched even for twenty-four hours.
The whole process may be compared to the perpetual running of millions of double threads, which reach from every soldier back ultimately to the central depots of the army, and thence to the manufactories, and these double threads perpetually working back and forth from the manufactories to the Front. These double threads--always travelling back and forth, remember--are gathered into a vast number of small, local centres, the sheaves or cords so formed are gathered back again to some hundreds of greater centres, and these ropes again concentrated upon some dozens of main bases of supply. And the ends of these threads--though all in continual movement back and forth--must each be kept taut, must cross sometimes one over the other in a complicated pattern perpetually requiring readjustment, while all the time now one, now another group of threads suddenly sets up a heavy strain, where the men to whom they relate are engaged in particularly violent action.
To keep such a web untangled, duly stretched, and accurately working is an effort of organization such as will never be seen in civilian life, and such as was never seen, even in military life, until modern times.