llectual, but he is not, in practical
matters, by any means a fool.

His sermons will be commonplace, but--you congratulate yourself on
this--they will certainly be short, and he will neither be surprised
nor hurt if nobody listens to them. There will be nothing mawkish
about his religion and he will not obtrude it over much, but when he
starts the men singing "Fight the good fight," that hymn will go with
a swing. In the officers' mess, when the shyness of the first few
days has worn off, he will be recognised as "a good sort." The men's
judgment, expressed in the canteen after a football match, will
differ from the officers' by one letter only. The padre will be
classed as "a good sport."

There are other sketches of padres, and they do not always represent
men of the senior-curate age. There is one, for instance, which
serves as an advertisement of a tobacco, in which the chaplain is a
man of forty or forty-five. Before the war he must have been vicar of
a fair-sized parish, very well organised. And it is not always the
"good sort" qualities which the artist emphasises. There is a
suggestion occasionally of a certain stiffness, a moral rigidity as
of a man not inclined to look with tolerant eyes on the "cakes and
ale" of life.

Sometimes we get a hint of a consciousness of official position. It
is not that the padre of these pictures is inclined to say "I'm an
officer and don't you forget it." He is not apparently suspected of
that. But he is a man who might conceivably say "I'm a priest and it
won't do for me to let any one forget that."

Yet, even in these pictures, we are left with the feeling that the
men who sat for them were competent and in their way effective. There
is no suggestion of feebleness, the characteristic of the pre-war
cleric which most commonly struck the artist. And we recognise that
the clergy have discarded pose and affectation along with the dog
collars which most of them have left behind in England. Freed from
the society of elderly women, the British cleric has without
difficulty made himself very much at home in the company of men.

That is the impression we get of the padre from the artists who have
drawn pictures of him. But there are not nearly enough of these
pictures to make us sure that it is in just this way that the men in
France regard the clergy who have gone on active service. The fact is
that the artists who have sketched generals and staff officers in
hundreds, subalter