Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/232

196 printed that day. They sent us with some interest through the great hangars where provisions and munitions were passed in a constant stream from transport to train. They gave us brcath to exclaim at this minute efficiency which had been developed in two years from almost nothing. It expressed itself most strikingly in a great factory building, once owned by a German.

Endless sacks of flour were lifted to the upper floor on chain elevators. Great soft mattresses of dough flopped down steep slides into the hands of a regiment of bakers, white-clothed, covered with flour, with the appearance of clowns half made up. At the entrance to each room a sergeant would remind us that these comic figures were soldiers, regularly enlisted. He would sing out:

"Bakers! 'Shun!"

And the long, ridiculous lines would stiffen. Only the staff officer's careless "Carry on would send them back to their labour of turning out more than two hundred thousand pounds of bread before night.

Efficiency stared at us from posters which carried minute instructions to be followed in case of an air attack, and about the occupations most peacefully industrial always the tattered garment of war.