alled Base Infantry.) There was a small permanent
staff in the camp, the colonel, the adjutant, the doctor, and myself
among the officers, a sergeant-major, an orderly-room staff, and a
few others among the men. Every one else passed in and out of the
camp, coming to us from England in drafts, or from hospitals as
details, going from us as drafts into the mists of the front. Our
camp occupied the place of a reservoir in a city's water supply. The
men and officers flowed in to us from many sources, stayed a while
and flowed out again through the conduits of troop trains when the
insatiable fighting army, perpetually using and losing men, turned
on its taps, demanding fresh supply.

It happened, I do not know why, that there had never been a chaplain
specially attached to that camp before. I have no reason to suppose
that a chaplain had been asked for or was specially desired. I
expected, at best, to be tolerated as a necessary evil; at worst to
be made to feel that I was a nuisance.

I was, in fact, extremely kindly received. My experience is that a
chaplain is almost always well received both by officers and men in
France, and is very much less a stranger than a parson at home who
finds himself in a club where he is not well known. But I do not
pretend that my first evening in that mess was a particularly
comfortable one. As it happened, neither the colonel nor the adjutant
was there. I had as companions half a dozen officers, any one of whom
was young enough to be my son. They were laboriously polite and
appallingly respectful. We talked to each other in restrained
whispers and I do not think that any one laughed during the whole
course of dinner.

My discomfort lasted far beyond that evening, and I do not wonder
that it took me some time to settle down. I came, for the first time
in my life, under military discipline. I lived in a mess, a strange
kind of life for me. I had to obey rules which I did not know and
conform to an etiquette which was utterly strange to me. Looking back
over it all now I realise that I must have blundered horribly, and
trodden, without intending to, on all sorts of tender feet. Yet, from
the moment I entered the camp I received nothing but kindness and
consideration.

The officers of our old army are wonderful. Every one, I think,
agrees about this. To me it seems that one of the most wonderful
things about them is the way they have treated civilians, amateurs,
always ignorant, often c