live for games, but who jumped into the King's uniform quicker than they
ever changed into flannels in their lives. 'It is the one good thing the
war has done--to give public-school fellows a chance--they are the one
class who are enjoying themselves in this war.' So wrote one whose early
innings was of the shortest; and though it was a boyish boast, and they
were not the only class by any means, I should like to know which other
was quite as valuable when the war, too, was in its infancy? In each and
every country, by one means or the other, the men were to be had: only
our Public Schools could have furnished off-hand an army of natural
officers, trained to lead, old in responsibility, and afraid of nothing
in the world but fear itself. There were very few of the first lot left
last March, and now there are many fewer. Of one particular Eton and
Harrow match, I believe it can be said that not half-a-dozen of the
twenty-two players are now alive. It was something to meet so noble a
survivor, still leading in battle as he had learnt to lead at school and
college, both on and off the field.

Nor had one to hang about hotels and restaurants, or camps or the street
corners, to see men straight from the fight or just going in, and to
take fresh heart from theirs. The chief local Y.M.C.A. was full of both
kinds, one more appealing than the other. It was perhaps the least
conscious appeal ever made to human heart; for men are proud in the day
of battle, and they are also mighty busy with their own affairs. What
pocket stores they were laying in! What sanguine reserves of tobacco and
cigarettes! That was a heartening sign. But there were no foreboding
faces that I could see. It is one of the strong points of the inner
soldier that he never thinks it is his turn; but if shell or bullet 'has
his name on it,' it will 'see him off,' as he also puts it. Some call
this fatalism. I call it Faith. It is their plain way of bowing to the
Will of God. But the only bow I saw was over the long last letters many
were writing, as though the bugle was already blowing for them, as
though they well knew what it meant. There was no looking unmoved upon
those bent backs and hurrying hands.

Nor were they the most poignant figures; it was the men who had been in
it that one could not keep one's eyes off. Those we had seen bathing in
the morning were nothing to them. They had a night's rest behind them;
these were brands still smoking from the fire. Dirty as dustmen,
red-eyed, and with the growth of all these days upon their haggard
faces, some sat at the tables, eating and drinking like men who had just
discovered their own emptiness; and many lay huddled on the floor, as on
the battle-field itself, filling the hut with its very atmosphere. To
step over them, and to sit with the men who had a mind to talk, was to
get into the red heart of the thing that was going on.

Not that they had very much to tell; all were hazy as to what had
happened; but all agreed it was the worst thing they had been through
yet, and all bore out our Sunday morning friend, that it was worse for
the enemy than for anybody else. This unanimity was remarkable;
especially if you consider, first the military history of that last ten
days in March, and secondly the fact that none of these unwounded
stalwarts was there for a normal reason. Each stood for scores or
hundreds who had gone under in the fight, or been taken prisoner. Yet it
was worse for the enemy! Yet we were going to win! I cannot swear to the
statement in those words, but it was implicit in their every utterance,
and emphatic in the things they never said. For though I brought
biscuits to many, and sat while they steeped them in their mugs and
gulped them down, not a first syllable of complaint reached my ears. On
that I would take my stand in any witness-box. And a Y.M.C.A. man knows;
they trust us, and speak their minds.

Often in the winter 'peace-time,' as hinted early in these notes, I have
seen men shudder at the prospect of the trenches, heard bitter murmurs
at the mud and misery, and have done my best to answer the natural cry:
'When is this dreadful war going to finish? It will never be finished by
fighting!' There was nothing of that sort to cope with now. In the
winter I have heard lamentations for the stray man killed by a sniper or
a stray shell. There was the case of the Lewis gunner who had earned his
special leave; there was 'the best wee sergeant,' and there were others.
But there was none of that now that men were falling by the thousand;
not from a single one of these ravenous, red-eyed survivors. You may say
it was their hunger, weariness, and consequent insensibility, the
acquiescence of the sleeper in the snow. But they were full of
confidence phlegmatic yet serene. They were on the winning side; there
was never a doubt of it on their lips or in their eyes; and with us they
had no reason to keep their doubts to themselves. They had voiced them
freely in the winter. But now they had no doubts to voice.

I do not propound their perspicacity or postulate an instinct they did
not claim themselves. I merely state a fact from observation of these
handfuls of men in the first days of the great crisis. That was the way
they reacted against the greatest enemy success since the first month of
the war. It is the English way, and always has been. And they happen to
be busy finishing the old sequel as I write.

Yet if you had seen their eyes! I remember as a little boy seeing Lady
Butler's 'Charge of the Light Brigade' at my first Academy. I am not
sure that I have looked upon the canvas since, but the wild-eyed central
figure, 'back from the mouth of Hell,' rises up before me after forty
years. There is, to be sure, only the most odious of comparisons between
his heroic stand and the posture of my friends, who were not posing for
a Victorian battle-piece, but bolting biscuits and spilling tea on a
Y.M.C.A. table in modern France. Nevertheless, some of them had those
eyes.

OTHER OLD FELLOWS

It was pleasant one morning to hear a sudden voice at my elbow: 'How's
the Rest Hut?' and to find at least one of its regular frequenters still
whole and hearty, in the press outside this teeming Y.M.C.A. But a more
embarrassing encounter occurred the same day and on the same too public
spot.

It began in the hut, with a couple of sad young Jocks, who were like to
be sad, as they might have said; but they only smiled in wry yet not
unhumorous resignation. Their story was that of thousands upon the
imperative stoppage of all leave. These two had started off on theirs,
and were going aboard at Boulogne when headed back to their Battalion,
which they had now to find. It chanced to be one of those to which I had
helped to minister in the sunken road at Christmas. They remembered the
Cocoa Man, as I had been called there, but in the morning they were not
demonstrative.

About mid-day we met again, and as I say, in the surging crowd outside
the Y.M.C.A. This time the case was sadly altered; the hapless pair had
been consoling themselves at another spring, and were at the
warm-hearted stage. Nothing was now too good for the poor Cocoa Man, no
compliment too wildly hyperbolical. Falling with their unabated forces
upon both his hands, only stopping short of the actual neck, they
greeted him as 'a brave mon' in that concourse of braves, and proceeded
to embroider the charge with unconscionable detail.

'Thairty-five yarrds from the Gairmans,' declared one, 'this ol' feller
was teemin' cocoa in the trenches. I'm tellin' ye! Lash C'rishmash--mind
ye--shnow an' ische! Thairty-five yarrds from the Gairmans--strike me
dead!'

A vindictive Deity might well have taken him at his word, for dividing
the real distance by more than ten. But nothing came of it except a
murmur of general incredulity, obsequiously confirmed by the Cocoa Man,
and from the other Jock's wagging head a sentimental echo: 'Thish ol'
feller! Thish ol' feller!' he could only say for the pavement's benefit.

'Why was _I_ there?' demanded the spokesman, with a rhetorical thump
upon his chest. 'Dis-_cip_-line--dis-_cip_-line--only reason _I_ was
there. But this ol' feller----'

'Thish ol' _feller_!' screamed the other, in a paroxysm of affection;
and when I had eventually retrieved both hands I left them singing my
longevity in those terms, like a catch, and took my blushes to a safer
part of the town.

'I've given them a bitty,' whispered one of our ministers, who had
assisted my escape, 'and told them to go away and get something to
_eat_.'

And the sly carnal wisdom of the advice, no less than the charity which
made it practicable, left a good taste in the mouth. It was the kind of
thing I ventured to think we wanted in our workers. In any community of
sinners there is room for the saint who will help a man to get sober
sooner than scold him for getting drunk.

Not that I saw above half-a-dozen tipsy men in all the huts that I was
ever in. They were to be seen, no doubt, but they did not come our way.
The soldier who seeks the Y.M. in his cups is not a hardened case. He is
the last person to be discouraged, as he will be the first to deplore
his imprudence in the morning. I have heard a splendid young New
Zealander speak of the lapse that had cost him his stripes as though
nobody had ever made so dire a fool of himself. That is the kind of
notion to scout even at the cost of a high line in these matters. It is
possible to make too much of the virtues that come easily to ourselves;
and to the average Y.M.C.A. man the cardinal virtues seemed very like
second nature. This is not covert irony, but a simple fact which, for
that matter, ought hardly to have been otherwise, since most of us were
ministers of one denomination or another. The minority were apt to
feel, but were not necessarily justified in feeling, that a more liberal
admixture of 'sinful laymen' might have put us, as a body, even more
intimately in touch with the men than we undoubtedly were.

Chief, however, among the virtues of my comrades, I think any
unprejudiced observer would have placed that of Courage. There were now
no fewer than eighty of us, all leaves before the wind of war, blown
helter-skelter into this little town that must be nameless. We had come
off all sorts and sizes of trees, down to the most sensitive and
frailest; but from the first squall to the last we were permitted to
face, and throughout these days of precarious shelter, in many ways a
higher test, I never saw a man among us outwardly the worse for nerves.
And be it known that the small personal escapes and excitements recorded
in these notes, were as nothing to the full-size adventures of a great
many of our refugees. In outlying huts, cheek by jowl with the camps
they served, the shelling had been far heavier and more direct than the
officers of the Rest Hut had been privileged to undergo; the
responsibility had been much greater, and the means of escape not to be
compared with ours. Little home-made dug-outs, under the hut itself, had
been their nearest approach to our vaulted dungeon, a tattoo of shrapnel
their variety of shell-music. Whole walls had been blown in on them,
men killed and wounded under the riddled roof. Some had suffered even
more from a bodyguard of our own guns than from the enemy; one reverend
gentleman declared in writing that his 'hut reeled like a ship in a
great sea.'

Another wrote: 'A wave of gas entered our domain and we had a season of
intense coughing and sneezing, also watering of eyes. Thinking it was
but a passing wave of gas from our own guns, we did not use our
respirators, but reaching up to a box of sweets I distributed them to my
comrades, and we lay sucking sweets to take away the taste.' (This was a
Baptist minister with a South African ribbon, and not the man to lie
long doing anything.) 'After breakfast I called upon the Artillery
Officers to offer my staff to make hot cocoa and supply biscuits during
the morning for the hard-worked gun-teams, an offer which he gratefully
accepted. I then made my way up to the dressing-station to see if the
Medical Officer required our services for the walking wounded. His reply
being in the affirmative, I took stock of the equipment we had on the
spot, then went back to bring up all necessary articles, also my
comrades. The small hut we have near the dressing-station for this work
was being so hotly shelled that the M.O. would not allow us to remain
there, so we worked outside the dressing-station door, a little more
sheltered, but still exposed to shell-fire. We comforted the wounded,
gave them hot tea and free cigarettes. A lull occurred during the
morning in our work, so Mr. ---- returned to make the cocoa for the
gun-teams, Mr. ---- remained to carry on at the dressing-station, and I
returned to clear the cash-boxes, fill my pockets with rescued
paper-money, prepared again for emergency.... We continued our work with
the wounded, and as the same increased in number, I then assisted in
bandaging the smaller wounds, having knowledge of that kind of work.
Later, the A.P.M. gave me his field-glasses and asked me to act as
observer and report to him every change in the progress of the battle of
the ridges. This was most interesting work, but meant constant exposure.
One of our aeroplanes sounded its hooter and dropped a message about 600
yards away. On reporting it I was asked to cross over and see that the
message was delivered to the correct battery.'

This was a man! But do not forget he was also a Baptist minister on a
four-months furlough at the front. 'Once a soldier!' he too may have
said after his first campaign, and clinched it by entering his ministry;
but here he was in his pious prime, excelling his lay youth in deeds of
gallantry, and covering our civilian heads with his reflected glory. No
wonder he 'heard from two sources that my work on that day received
mention in military dispatches.' Let us hope it did. 'If true,' he makes
haste to add, 'the work of my two colleagues is as much deserving.' But
who inspired them? Before they turned their backs, 'the advancing
Germans were only about 700 yards away. Securing some of our goods, we
decided to retire upon ---- for the night and return if possible the
next day.' The last six words italicise themselves.

The party went out of the frying-pan into heavier fire further back:
'Soon after we had retired to rest the Germans commenced to bombard the
place with high velocity shells from long range.... A Lieutenant in our
hut went to the door, but reeled back immediately with a shattered arm.
A Corporal outside received a nasty wound in the shoulder. We set to
work bandaging the wounds of these men and making them comfortable while
others went to obtain a conveyance. There was no shelter, so after the
wounded were safely on their way to a C.C.S. we lay down in our
blankets, considering it as easy to be shelled in the warm as standing
in the cold'--more wine that needs no printer's bush. Later, he relieved
the leader of a very hot hut indeed, where he had for colleague 'one who
was calm in the hour of danger.' Here the congenial pair 'were able to
carry on for four days, when the order came for us to evacuate. We
distributed our stock of goods to the soldiers, then closed up. That
night we lay in our blankets counting the bursting shells around us at
three shells per minute.' On their arrival in our common port, naturally
not before, 'the effects of the gas at ---- began to make themselves
felt, and I was ordered by the Medical Officer to take a week's complete
rest.' One wonders if a rest was better earned in all those terrific
days.

The document from which I have been quoting is only one of many placed
at my disposal. It is typical of them all, exceptional solely in the
telling simplicity of the narrator. The writer was not our only minister
who came through the fire pure gold; he was not even the only Baptist
minister. One there was, the gentlest of souls, whose heroic story I may
yet make shift to tell, though it deserves the hand of Mr. Service or of
'Woodbine Willie.' Such were the men I had the honour of working with
last winter, and of such their adventures as against the personal
experiences it was necessary to recount first or else not at all. I
confess they make my Rest Hut look a little too restful as I set them
down; for there we were wonderfully spared the tangible horrors of the
situation; but many of these others, as little used to bloodshed as
ourselves, had left a shambles behind them, and looked upon the things
that haunt a mind.

And yet, as I began by saying, not a man of them showed shaken nerves,
or what mattered more to those of us who had seen less, a shaken faith.
Therein they were not only worthy of the men they had served so
devotedly to the end, but of the sublime tradition it was theirs to
uphold. It was a great matter that there should not have been one heart
among us so faint as to affect another, that we should have carried
ourselves at least outwardly as I think we did. But to some of us it
seemed a yet greater matter, in the days of anti-climax and reaction now
in store, that those to whom we were entitled to look for spiritual
support did not fail us in a single instance.

THE REST CAMP--AND AFTER

Y.M.C.A. work was over for the time being in the fighting areas.
Hundreds of huts and mountains of stores had been abandoned or
destroyed. What was to be done with the six or seven dozen of us, now
thoroughly superfluous men (and as many more in other centres), was the
immediate problem. It was solved by the High Command putting at our
disposal an Army rest-camp on the coast.

Thither we all started by rail on the evening of Tuesday, March 26th.
Ten minutes after our train left, the station was heavily bombed;
half-an-hour later we were lying low in a cutting, under a mercilessly
full moon, but perhaps in deeper shadow than we supposed, while a German
aeroplane scoured the sky for mischief. There was an Anti-Aircraft
Battery also concealed about the district; thanks to its activities, we
were at length able to proceed with less fear of molestation. But only
fitfully; the full moon saw to that. It was as light as noonday through
smoked glasses, and very soon our train was hiding in the next wood that
happened to intersect the line.

Did we waste time talking about it, discussing our chances, or mildly
anathematising our last-straw luck? Not for many minutes; at least, not
in the bare truck round which some fifty of us squatted on our baggage.
We had begun the last stage of our exodus in a certain fashion; and in
that fashion we went on--and on. Before we were five minutes out, one of
them had struck up a hymn, and we had sung it with all our lungs and
hearts. Another and another followed; and in the stoppages, after a
human peep at the sky, and a silence broken by the beat of the
destroyer's engine, there was always some exalted voice to lead us yet
again, and a stentorian following every time. Though the tunes were
often strange to me, and to my mind no improvement on the ones I wanted,
the hymns themselves were the old hymns that take a man back to his old
home and his old school. Each was like a bottle charged with the essence
of some ancient scene. One savoured the scents of vanished rooms, heard
the sound of voices long past singing or long ago stilled; forgotten
influences, childish promptings, looks and thoughts and sayings, came
leaping out of the dead past into that dark truck hiding for dear life
in a wood. And of all the unreal situations I was ever in--or invented,
for that matter--this at last struck me as about the most unconvincing
and far-fetched. Yet at the same time, like all else that really
matters, it seemed the most natural thing in the world: as though the
whole history of mankind had not led up to the horrors and splendours of
this stupendous war more inevitably than our fifty life-lines converged
in that truck-load of brave, faithful, hymn-singing men.

Then a hymn would end, and there would be sometimes as much as a minute
of natural talk and normal thinking. But it was like the lorries full of
fighting-men in the moonlit dust; always a new leader filled the breach;
and the officers of the Rest Hut had long been stolid listeners when we
stopped once more, not to hide, but at some station, and that weary pair
sneaked out into another truck. Here there were but other two before
them: a sardonic Anglican, and a young man enviably asleep under less
covering than would have soothed our thinner blood. Side by side we
cowered upon a packing-case, a Rest Hut blanket about our legs, and
discussed the secular situation over a pipe. Almost the last thing we
two had heard in the town was a whisper about the German cavalry; a
rumour so sensational that we were keeping it to ourselves; but it only
confirmed the mate in his prophetic conviction that the fools were just
cutting their own throats deeper with every mile they advanced. That was
_his_ hymn; not a stage of our flight had he failed to beguile with the
grim refrain; but in the truck I seem to recall a wilder dream of
getting into some dead man's uniform, if the other folly went much
further, and risking a firing-party for one blow at a Boche by fair or
foul. It was perhaps as well that we were going beyond the reach of any
such desperate temptations.

The Rest Camp was on a chilly plateau at the mouth of the Somme: it
might have been the Murrambidgee for all the warfare within reach. A few
faint flashes claimed our wistful attention on a clear night, but I have
heard the guns better here in Sussex. On the other hand, it was a
military camp, laid out on scientific principles that appealed to the
camp-following spirit, and military discipline kept us on our acquired
mettle. I had not slept under canvas for thirty years, and rather
dreaded it, especially as the weather had turned cold and unsettled. A
tent in the rain had perhaps more terrors for many of us than a snug hut
under occasional shell-fire; but few if any were the worse for the
experience. Indeed, the chief drawback was an appetite out of all
proportion to available rations; but, though tempers were at times on
edge, and fists clenched in the bacon queue, on one of our few bacon
mornings, no grumbling disgraced the board. We reminded ourselves and
each other of the lads we had left to bear the brunt, and we started
our humdrum days with vociferous jocosity in the wash-house.

Easter was upon us before we were fairly settled, or a tent pitched
large enough to hold us all; and it was 'in sundry places,' indeed, that
we mobilised as a congregation. One was the open shed in which we
shivered over meals, and one the camp shower-baths. But on Easter Day,
which was fine and bright, all adjourned to a neighbouring wood, then
breaking into bud and song; and sitting or leaning in a circle against
the trees, at the intersection of two green rides, we held our service
in Nature's sanctuary. In that ring of unmilitary men in khaki there
were few who had not been nearer violent death than ever in their lives
before, very few but were prepared to face it afresh at the first
chance, one at least who was soon to be killed behind his counter; and
presently a young man standing in our midst, an Anglican with a
Nonconformist gift of speech, brought the spring morning home to our
hearts, filled them with thankfulness for our lot and trust in the
issue, and pride of sacrifice, and love of Him Who showed the way, in a
sermon one would not have missed for the best they were getting in
London at that hour. It was not the only fine sermon we had in the Rest
Camp; and wonderful it was to hear the same simple note struck so often,
albeit from different angles of the Christian faith, and so seldom
forced. We must have had representatives of all the English-spoken
Churches, save and except the parent of them all; constantly an Anglican
and a Dissenter would officiate together, with many a piquant compromise
between their respective usages; but when it came to preaching, they
were like searchlights trained from divers quarters upon the same
central fact of Christianity. The separate beams might taper off into
the night, but high overhead they met and mingled in a single splendour.

But there was one minister who took no part; he lay too sick in our
tent; and yet his mere record is the sermon I remember best. He was that
other Baptist already mentioned, a shy bachelor of fifty, the most
diffident and (one might have thought) least resolute of men. A lad he
loved had come out and been killed; the impulse took him to follow and
throw himself into the war in the only capacity open to his years. The
Y.M.C.A. is the refuge of those consciously or unconsciously in quest of
this anodyne. We had met at my first hut, where he had slaved many days
as an extra hand. Never was one of us so deferential towards the men;
never were they served with a more intense solicitude, or addressed
across the counter with so many marks of respect. 'Sir,' he never
failed to call them to their faces, or 'this gentleman' when invoking
expert intervention. That gentleman, being one, never smiled; but we
did, sometimes, in our room. Then one Sunday I persuaded him to preach.
It was a revelation. The hut had heard nothing simpler, manlier,
straighter from the shoulder; and the war, not just then the safest
subject, was finely and bravely treated, both in the sermon and the
final prayer. A fighting sermon and a fighting prayer, for all the
gentle piety that formed the greater part, and all the sensitive
mannerism which would never make us smile again.

At that time our outpost in the support line, scene of my Christmas
outing, had been running a good many weeks; and its popularity as a
holiday resort was not imperceptibly upon the wane. Most of us had
tasted its fearful joys, and there were no offers for a second helping;
it was emphatically a thing to have done rather than the thing to do
again. It came to the Baptist's turn, and when his week was up there was
a genuine difficulty in relieving him, one or two on the rota having
fallen sick. Our young commandant went up to ask if he would mind doing
an extra day or two. Mind! It was his one desire; he was as happy as a
king--and he had quite transformed the place. The tiny hut was no longer
the pig-sty described in an earlier note; it was as neat and spotless
as an old maid's sanctum. The urns were like burnished silver. The fire
never smoked. The bed had been brought in from the unspeakable tunnel
under the sand-bags; it was as dry as a bone, and curtained off at its
own end of the cabin. All these improvements the Baptist had wrought
single-handed, besides fending and cooking for himself: no Battalion
Headquarters for him! An extra week was just what he had been longing
for; in point of fact, he stayed four weeks on end, as against my four
paltry days!

Shells arrived in due course; death happened at the door; men grievously
wounded staggered in for first aid; the lengthening days kept him
fireless till evening; but the cocoa had never been so well made, or so
continuous the supply. Once a big shell burst within a yard of the
grassy roof, on the very edge of the high ground of which the roof was a
colourable extension. It brought down all the mugs and urns and
condensed-milk tins with a run; and that day we did see the Baptist at
our mid-day board. 'It shook me up a bitty,' he confessed with his shy
laugh; but back he went in the afternoon; and illness alone restored him
to us when the month was up.

But the gem of his performance was an act of moral gallantry: and here
is needed the Rough Rhyme of a Padre or of a Red Cross Man. One cold
night a Sergeant-Major--Regimental, I do believe--honoured the cabin
with his presence, only to fire a burst of improper language at the
weather and the war. The Baptist, whom we may figure on the verge of
genuflexion before the august guest, lost not a moment in standing up to
him.

'You can't talk like that here, sir!' he cried with stern simplicity.
'It's not allowed!'

'Can't,' if you please, and 'not allowed'! You picture the audience
settling down to the dreadful drama, hear the cold shudders of the
callow, see the turkey-cock turning an appropriate purple. He very soon
showed what he could do; but it was no longer a spontaneous or such a
glib display. The rum that happened somehow to be in him seems to have
had something to do with this; but not, it may be, as much as the
Sergeant-Major pretended; and the torpor that rather suddenly supervened
I diagnose as the ready resource of an expert in camouflage. Better
gloriously drunk than ignominiously admonished by an unprintable hiatus
of a Y.M. Padre!

So a party of muscular volunteers escorted the S.M. to his dug-out. But
the next day he returned alone, crisp-footed and square-jawed,
apparently to put the Baptist in his place for ever. Exactly what
followed, that gentle hero was not the man to relate. Again one
pictures Peeping Tommies exposing themselves on the sunken road to see
the fun, perhaps the murder; but what I really believe they might have
seen, before many minutes were up, was the spectacle of the two
protagonists upon their knees.

Stranger things have been happening, even on that sunken road of ours.
It was lost to us in those very days of the Army Rest Camp; it had not
been recovered when I was busy expatiating on its Christmas charms; its
recovery was one of the first loose stones in the avalanche of vast
events which has caught me up.... And now they say the war is over! To
have seen something of it all in the last dark hour--and nothing
since--is to find even more than the old war-time difficulty in
believing half one hears. One has too many fixed ideas and violent
impressions, not only of those four months, but of these four years: a
man has to clear his own entanglements before he can begin to advance
with such times. In the meantime the patter about Indemnities and
Demobilisation leaves him cold. Demobilisation will have to begin nearer
home than charity, in the armies of our thoughts; and some are not as
highly disciplined as others, some hearts too sore to enter as they
would into this Peace.

For them there is still the Y.M.C.A. That little force of camp-followers
still holds the field, has nothing to say to any Armistice, may well
have started its most strenuous campaign. With the Armies of Occupation
its work will hardly be the romantic enterprise it was; with all the
danger, most of the glamour will have departed; but the deeper
attractions are the less adventitious, while the Rhine at any rate
should provide some piquant novelties in place of old excitements. The
grand fleet of huts will soon be anchored there--including, as I hope,
the new Rest Hut that was to have been tucked up close behind the Line.
Once more before each counter there will be the old press of matchless
manhood and humanity; neater and sprucer, I make no doubt, but otherwise
neither more nor less like conquering heroes than their old
unconquerable selves; and just once more, behind the counter, the chance
of a lifetime, but the last chance, for 'sinful laymen' of the milder
sort!

Will it be taken? Are our courageous ministers to have the last field
practically to themselves, or will a few mere men of the world even now
step in, if only for the honour of the laity? They would if they knew
what the work is like and what it may be made, how free a hand is given
one, how generously one is met by all concerned, and the modicum of
spiritual equipment essential if only that modicum be sincere. Pre-war
notions about the Young Men's Christian Association still militate a
little against the Y.M.C.A. for all the halo of success attaching to
those capitals; but hear a soldier from the front upon the 'Y.M.' _tout
court_, and his affectionate abbreviation of an abbreviation will in
itself tell you something of the institution as it is to-day. It has
meant rather more to him than 'tea and prayer in equal parts'; yet that
conception still prevails in superior circles. Quite lately I heard a
dignitary of the Established Church speak with pain of a brilliant young
Oxford man of his acquaintance, who, rejected of the Army, must needs be
'giving out tea in some tent in France!' It seemed to him a truly
shocking waste of fine material; but if that young man was not giving
out a great deal more than creature comforts, and getting at least as
good as he gave, then it was a still more wanton waste of an opportunity
which the finest young man alive might have been proud to seize.

The truth is, of course, that no man is too good for this job. He may be
a specialist, and more valuable to the community where he is than he
would be (to the community) in a Y.M.C.A. or a Church Army hut. He may
be a Cabinet Minister, a Bishop, or a Judge: that does not make him too
good to minister to the men who have borne the brunt of this war: it
only makes him too busy and perhaps too old. One must not even now be
extra liable to 'die of winter,' as the Tynesider said, nor yet too
dainty about bed and board. But the better the man, the better he will
do this work, the more he will bring to it, the more he will find in it;
the greater will be his tact, the greater his loving-kindness and
humility; the readier will he be to recognise many a better man than
himself in our noble rank-and-file--to learn all they have to teach him
in patience and naturalness, unselfishness and simplicity--and to
perceive the higher service involved in serving them, even across a
counter.

    To Him Who made the Heavens move and cease not in their motion--
    To Him Who leads the haltered tides twice a day round ocean--
    Let His name be magnified in all poor folks' devotion!

    Not for Prophecies or Powers, Visions, Gifts or Graces,
    But the unrelenting hours that grind us in our places,
    With the burden on our backs, the smile upon our faces.

    Not for any miracle of easy loaves and fishes,
    But for work against our will and waiting 'gainst our wishes--
    Such as gathering up the crumbs and cleaning dirty dishes.

It may or may not be that Mr. Kipling is thinking of the Y.M.C.A. I do
not know the title of his poem, or whether it has yet appeared
elsewhere, or another line of it. These lines I owe to his kindness, and
as usual they crystallise all that one was trying to say. But to some of
us the crumbs that fell were a feast of fine humanity, and great indeed
was his reward who gathered them.

_Printed in Great Britain by _Butler and Tanner_, Frome and London._

Transcriber's Note: The following typographical errors present in the
original edtion have been corrected.

In "Under Way", =equal fimrness and good-humour= was changed to =equal
firmness and good-humour=.

In "Christmas Day", =abroad on the battlefield= was changed to =abroad on
the battle-field=.

In "The Babes in the Trenches", =The fire was out; it seemed= was changed
to =The fire was out, it seemed=.

In "Orderly Men", a period was changed to a comma after =copies for
myself=.

In "The Hut in Being", ='I don't want the political'!= was changed to ='I
don't want the political!'=

In "War and the Man", =argumentum at hominem= was changed to =argumentum ad
hominem=.