ffee and tea, candles, bootlaces, and smokes, and then,
as they had some time, they started having a wash--the first since they
left Blighty. The footboard of the train was the washstand, the
shaving-table, and the dressing-table. But they didn't sing.

I saw in a corner of that little canteen a pile of postcards, and I said,
"Who says a postcard for wife or mother?"

Somebody asked, "Who's going to see them posted?"

I said, "I am. You leave them to me."

They said, "All right," and I began to give out the postcards.

I started at one end of the train and went on to the other end. In the
middle I found two carriages full of officers.

"Gentlemen," I said, "will you please censor these postcards as I collect
them, and that will relieve the pressure on the local staff, for I don't
want to put any extra work on them?"

"Oh, certainly," they answered, and I sent a dozen or twenty up at a time
to them, and in fifteen minutes that train was steaming out of the station
and the boys were singing, "Should auld acquaintance."

When they had gone I collected the postcards that had been written and
censored--and there were 575. To keep the boys in touch with home is
religion; to keep in their lives the finest, the most beautiful
home-sentiment that God ever gives to the world is a bit of religion--pure
and undefiled.

* * * * *

How gloriously brave are the French women and Belgian women! I was talking
to one in London--a young girl not more than eighteen or nineteen. She was
serving me in a restaurant, and I saw she was wiping her eyes, so I called
her to me and said, "What's the matter, my child?"

She answered, "Sir, I came over on the boat from Belgium early in the war,
and my mother and sisters got scattered, and I have never seen or heard of
them since."

And the Madame of the restaurant came to me a little while afterwards, and
said, "We dare not tell her, but they were all killed."

Many people at home don't realise what is going on. Some are in mourning,
some have lost boys, some have lost husbands, brothers, but we have not
suffered as others have suffered. I was riding in a French train a few
weeks ago. Beside me sat a lady draped in mourning. I could not see her
face, it was so thickly veiled with crape. Beside her was a nurse, and the
lady wept, oh, so bitterly! I cannot bear to see anybody weeping. If I see
a little child crying in the street I want to comfort it. If I se