o appreciate the wisdom of it before I
had been a week in the army. I said it over and over to myself. If I
had kept a diary I should have written it as often as Wolfe Tone did.
I had need of all its consolation when the time came for me to leave
H.

One evening--I was particularly busy at the moment in the Y.S.C.--an
orderly summoned me to the chaplain's office to answer a telephone
call. I learned that orders had come through for my removal from H.
to B. I had twenty-four hours' notice. That is more than most men
get, double as much as an officer gets who is sent up the line. Yet I
felt irritated. I am getting old and I hate being hustled. Also I
felt quite sure that there was no need for any kind of hurry.

As it appeared in the end I might just as well have had three or four
more days quietly at H. and started comfortably. I arrived at my
destination, a little breathless, to find I was not wanted for a
week. My new senior chaplain was greatly surprised to see me. My
predecessor had not given up the post I was to fill. There was
nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go. I spent several days,
most unprofitably, in B. which I might have spent usefully in H. But
this is the way things are done in the army, sometimes; in the
Chaplains' Department generally. And "_'Tis but in vain for soldiers
to complain_."

I fully expected to make a bad start on my new journey. Having been
fussed I was irritable. I had spent a long day trying to do twenty
things in a space of time which would barely have sufficed for ten of
them. I had been engaged in an intermittent struggle with various
authorities for permission to take my servant with me, a matter which
my colonel arranged for me in the end.

I was in the worst possible mood when I reached the station from
which I had to start--a large shed, very dimly lit, designed for
goods traffic, not for passengers. Oddly enough I began to recover my
temper the moment I entered the station. I became aware that the
whole business of the starting of this great supply train was almost
perfectly organised, so well organised that it ran more smoothly,
with less noise and agitation, than goes to the nightly starting of
the Irish mail from Euston.

The train itself, immensely long, was drawn up the whole length of
the station and reached out for a distance unknown to me into the
darkness beyond the station. There were passenger coaches and horse
waggons. Every waggon was plainly labelled