Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/131

 WAY OF MINISTERING TO THE ARMIES. 87 meat, for vegetables, for forage, for timber, if c H a p. needed, and fuel, they of course trusted mainly ' at first (as belligerents almost always nmst do) to the resources of the countries occupied by their armies, or some of the neighbouring pro- vinces : but when the Allied armies suffered change of measures t/i themselves to become penned up, m the way we which they „ 1 weresubse- have seen, upon a small barren corner or ground, qwcntiy 1 1 • • 1 J.1 driven. there was cast upon their providers the new, anxious task of supplying them by sea with every manner of thing that they needed, how- ever bulky and cumbersome, — so that, when dis- embarked with great labour from many a ship, the freights would not only include huge parks of artillery, and accumulated munitions of war, but, moreover, crowd acres and acres and acres with draught and pack horses and mules, with dromedaries, with waggons and carts, with herds and flocks awaiting slaughter, with pyramids of grain and flour sacks, with mounds of vegetables, with ricks of hay and straw, with hillocks of charcoal for fuel, with numberless stacks of timber. III. To accomplish so much, and do at once for the armies what commerce — with the practice of centuries — finds means to do for a city, it was not only requisite that those portions of the needed supplies which were not already in store should be promptly obtained, but that numberless ves- sels should be sailing and steaming from Eng- land, from France, from Algeria ; that some of