The whole system is, in reality, very simple, and it enables large armies in the field to be supplied daily with fresh meat and bread instead of being dependent on food brought up slowly and in many stages, and for that reason necessarily of a character less nutritious, and much more liable in the long run to cause illness among the men. At the same time, the big carrying capacity of the motor has served to clear the roads behind the army of an enormous block of vehicles essential in the past, but now no longer necessary. In connection with this point, Colonel R. H. Ewart, D.S.O., representing the Indian Office at the Imperial Motor Transport Conference of 1913, gave some very interesting figures, which may be quoted as an extreme case:
“Up to 1910 the reports show that there were nearly five-and-a-half million bullock carts in British India alone, and in all our wars up to date, we have had to mobilise a very large number of these carts for our line of communication work. We find that when moving in large bodies, the utmost speed we can rely upon is about one-and-a-half miles an hour. We have worked out that it takes six bullock carts to move in eighty days what one 2-ton lorry can transport in ten. The bullock carts take up twice the room on the road for a given load, and in the matter of establishment--a question which you will all realise in the time of war is a very serious one--it takes thirty-five men, drivers, artificers and supervisors to look after what one man could do with a lorry.”
From these figures it will be seen what an enormous saving is effected by the use of motors, even if we only take the point of view of the feeding, maintenance and payment of the men actually employed in the transport columns themselves.
The impossibility of imposing upon horsed vehicles the necessity for gaining fifty or even thirty miles in the course of a day, in order to catch up by the evening with an advancing army after leaving railhead in the morning, is perfectly obvious. The truth of the statement already made that the use of motors for transport and supply work is a necessity and not merely a convenience in modern warfare, is thus made clear, and under the circumstances, readers who are perhaps more attracted by the more showy, but less essential, uses of motors in war, will understand that a consideration of the subject of this book must necessarily be devoted very largely to the organisation and _matériel_ of the supply columns.