leaving him there. If he survives, he has learned to swim and the
method has proved its value. If he drowns, his parents have no
further anxiety about him. The authorities who are responsible for
the religion of the army believe in this plan for teaching chaplains
their business. Having accepted a civilian parson as a volunteer,
they dump him down in a camp without instruction or advice, without
even so much as a small red handbook on field tactics to guide him.
There he splutters about, makes an ass of himself in various ways,
and either hammers out some plan for getting at his job by many
bitter failures, or subsides into the kind of man who sits in the
mess-room with his feet on the stove, reading novels and smoking
cigarettes--either learns to swim after a fashion or drowns
unlamented.

M., who had at all events three months' English experience behind
him, found himself on the top of a steep hill, the controller of a
wooden church planted in the middle of a sea of sticky mud. He
ministered to a curiously mixed assortment of people, veterinary men,
instructors in all kind of military arts, A.S.C. men, and the men of
a camp known as Base Horse Transport.

The army authorities have been laughed at since the war began on
account of their passion for inverting the names of things. You must
not, if you want such a thing, say one pot of raspberry jam. You say,
instead, jam, raspberry, pot, one. It is odd that in the few cases in
which such inversion is really desirable the authorities refuse to
practise it. Horse Transport, Base, would be intelligible after
thought. Base Horse Transport, till you get accustomed to it, seems a
gratuitous insult to a number of worthy animals, not perhaps highly
bred but strong and active.

Base Detail is another example of the same thing. To describe a man
as a detail is bad enough. To call him a Base Detail must lower his
self-respect, and as a rule these poor fellows have done nothing to
deserve it. A Base Details Camp contains, for the most part, men who
have just recovered from wounds received in the service of King and
Country. "Details" perhaps is unavoidable, but it would surely be
possible to conform to the ordinary army usage and call the place
Camp, Details, Base.

My fate was more fortunate than M.'s. I had no church--he had the
better of me there--but I was put into a homogeneous camp, an
Infantry Base. (Our colonel was a masterful man. He would not have
allowed us to be c