nd east and north
and south men poured in. There was activity everywhere. Water was laid
on, and the men got the privilege of taking shower-baths, beside the
dusty roads. Bands played; pipers retired to the woods and practised
unearthly music calculated to fire the breast of the Scotsman with a
lust for blood. We had rifle practice on the marvellous ranges. We had
sham battles in which the men engaged so intensely that on one (p. 017)
occasion, when the enemy met, one over-eager soldier belaboured his
opponent with the butt end of his rifle as though he were a real
German, and the poor victim, who had not been taught to say "Kamarad",
suffered grievous wounds and had to be taken away in an ambulance.
Though many gales and tempests had blown round those ancient
mountains, nothing had ever equalled the latent power in the hearts of
the stalwart young Canadians who had come so swiftly and eagerly at
the call of the Empire. It is astonishing how the war spirit grips
one. In Valcartier began that splendid comradeship which spread out to
all the divisions of the Canadian Corps, and which binds those who
went to the great adventure in a brotherhood stronger than has ever
been known before.

Valcartier was to me a weird experience. The tents were cold. The
ground was very hard. I got it into my mind that a chaplain should
live the same life as the private soldier, and should avoid all
luxuries. So I tried to sleep at night under my blanket, making a
little hole in the ground for my thigh bone to rest in. After lying
awake for some nights under these conditions, I found that the
privates, especially the old soldiers, had learnt the art of making
themselves comfortable and were hunting for straw for beds. I saw the
wisdom of this and got a Wolesley sleeping bag, which I afterwards
lost when my billet was shelled at Ypres. Under this new arrangement I
was able to get a little rest. A kind friend in Quebec provided fifty
oil stoves for the use of the Quebec contingent and so we became quite
comfortable.

The dominating spirit of the camp was General Hughes, who rode about
with his aides-de-camp in great splendour like Napoleon. To me it
seemed that his personality and his despotic rule hung like a dark
shadow over the camp. He was especially interesting and terrible to us
chaplains, because rumour had it that he did not believe in chaplains,
and no one could find out whether he was going to take us or not. The
chaplains in c