played on it every day and all day long. I am not, I am often
thankful for it, acutely musical. But there have been times in
Y.M.C.A. huts when I felt I should shriek if I heard the tune of
"Home Fires" again.

I was playing chess one afternoon with a man who was beating me. I
became so much absorbed in the game that I actually ceased to hear
the piano. Then, after a while I heard it again, played in quite an
unusual manner. The player had got beyond "Irish Eyes" and the rest
of those tunes. He was playing, with the tenderest feeling, one of
Chopin's Nocturnes. He asked me afterwards if I could by any means
borrow for him a volume of Beethoven, one which contained the
"Waldstein" if possible. He confessed that he could not play the
"Waldstein" without the score. He was an elderly man, elderly
compared to most of those round him. He was in the R.E., a sapper.
There must be scores of musicians of taste and culture in the army. I
wonder if there was another employed in laying out roads behind the
Somme front.

I gained a reputation, wholly undeserved, as a chess player while I
was in that camp, and I was generally able to put up some sort of
fight against my opponents even if they beat me in the end.

But I was utterly defeated by one man, a Russian. He could speak no
English and very little French. He belonged to a Canadian regiment,
but how he got into it or managed to live with his comrades I do not
know. He and I communicated with each other only by moving the pieces
on the chess board. I suppose he was a member of the Russian Church,
but on Sundays he attended the services which I conducted. He used to
sit as near me as he could and I always found his places for him. He
could not read English any more than he could speak it, so the Prayer
Book cannot have been much use to him. But there was no priest of his
own church anywhere within reach, and he was evidently a religious
man. I suppose he found the Church of England service better than
none at all.

There was always one difficulty about the Church of England services
in that camp. We had to trust to chance for a pianist who could play
chants, responses, and hymns, and for a choir who could sing them.
The choir difficulty was not serious. It was nearly always possible
to get twenty volunteers who had sung in church choirs at home. But
a pianist who was familiar with church music was a rare person to
find. When found he had a way, very annoying to me, of getting