A Padre in France E-Book

George A. Birmingham

• Herausgeber: Sheba Blake Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 291

Beschreibung

With the memoir A Padre in France, Irish clergyman James Owen Hannay (who used the pseudonym "George A. Birmingham") takes a break from the humorous political satires that were his typical stock in trade. Still, Hannay's characteristic wit and lighthearted take on life shine through in this firsthand account of his stint as a chaplain during World War I. George A. Birmingham was the pen name of James Owen Hannay (16 July 1865 – 2 February 1950), Irish clergyman and prolific novelist. Hannay was born in Belfast and educated at Methodist College Belfast from 1883-1884 before attending Trinity College, Dublin. He was ordained in 1889 as a Church of Ireland (Anglican) minister and served as rector of Holy Trinity Church, Westport in County Mayo. His early writings raised the ire of nationalist Catholics, and he withdrew from the Gaelic League in the wake of ongoing protests about the tour of his successful play General John Regan. He became rector of Kildare parish from 1918 to 1920, and after serving as chaplain to the Viceroy of Ireland, he joined the British ambassadorial team in Budapest in 1922. He returned to officiate at Mells, Somerset from 1924 to 1934, after which he was appointed vicar of Holy Trinity Church in the London suburb of Kensington where he served from 1934 to his death in 1950.

Leseprobe

A PADRE IN FRANCE

BY

GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM

Copyright © 2018 by George A. Birmingham.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations em- bodied in critical articles or reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organiza- tions, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Book and Cover design by Sheba Blake Publishing

First Edition: February 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER I

THE UTTERMOST PART

I have always admired the sagacity of Balak, King of Moab, about whom we learn something in the Book of Numbers. He was threatened with invasion by a powerful foe and felt unequal to offering armed resistance. He invoked the aid of spiritual powers by inviting a prophet, Balaam, to come and curse the army of the invaders. Balaam suffered himself to be persuaded and bribed by the king. All kings--and the statesmen who nowadays regulate the conduct of kings--understand the business of managing men so far. Persuasion and bribery are the methods of statecraft. But Balak knew more than the elements of his trade. He understood that spiritual forces, if merely bribed, are ineffective. To make a curse operate there must be a certain amount of conviction in the mind of the curser. Balaam was not convinced, and when he surveyed the hosts of Israel from the top of a hill felt himself compelled by the spirit within him to bless instead of curse. The king, discouraged but not hopeless, took the prophet to the top of another hill, showed him a different view of the camp of Israel and invited him to curse the people from there.

At first sight this seems a foolish thing to have done; but properly considered it appears very crafty. From the fresh viewpoint, Balaam saw not the whole, but only the "uttermost part" of the hosts of Israel. I suppose he no longer saw the first-line troops, the army in battle array. Instead he saw the base camps, the non-combatant followers of the army, a great deal that was confused and sordid, very little that was glorious or fine. It might conceivably have been possible for him to curse the whole army and cast a blight upon its enterprise, when his eyes rested only on the camp-followers, the baggage trains, the mobs of cattle, the maimed and unfit men; when the fine show of the fighters was out of sight. Plainly if a curse of any real value was to be pronounced it must be by a prophet who saw much that was execrable, little that was obviously glorious.

It is Balak's sagacity in choosing the prophet's second point of view which I admire. If any cursing of an army is done at all, it will be done by some one, whose post is behind the lines, who has seen, not the whole, but only the uttermost part, and that the least attractive part of the hosts.

It was my luck to remain, all the time I was in France, in safe places. I never had the chance of seeing the gallantry of the men who attack or the courageous tenacity of those who defend. I missed all the excitement. I experienced none of those hours of terror which I have heard described, nor saw how finely man's will can triumph over terror. I had no chance of knowing that great comradeship which grows up among those who suffer together. War, seen at the front, is hell. I hardly ever met any one who doubted that. But it is a hell inhabited not by devils, but by heroes, and human nature rises to unimaginable heights when it is subjected to the awful strain of fighting. It is no wonder that those who have lived with our fighting army are filled with admiration for the men, are prepared to bless altogether, not war which we all hate, but the men who wage it.

The case is very different behind the lines. There, indeed, we see the seamy side of war. There are the men who, in some way or other, have secured and keep safe jobs, the embusqués whom the French newspapers constantly denounce. There are the officers who have failed, proved unfit for command, shown themselves lacking in courage perhaps, and in mercy have been sent down to some safe base. There are the men who have been broken in spirit as well as in body, who drag on an existence utterly dull, very toilsome, well-nigh hopeless, and are illuminated by no high call for heroic deeds. There the observer sees whatever there is to be seen of petty spite and jealousies, the manipulating of jobs, the dodging of regulations, all that is most ignoble in the soldier's trade. There also are the men with grievances, who, in their own estimation, are fit for posts quite other than those they hold. Some one described war at the front as an affair of months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. If that philosopher had been stationed at a base he might have halved his epigram and described war as months of boredom unpunctuated even by terror.

Yet even behind the lines, in the remotest places, that which moves our admiration far outshines what is sordid and mean. We still bless, not war, but soldiers. We forget the failures of man in joyful contemplation of his achievements.

Here are the great hospitals, where suffering men succeed each other day after day, so that we seem to see a mist of pain rising like a ceaseless cloud of incense smoke for the nostrils of the abominable Moloch who is the god of war. A man, though long inured to such things, may curse the Moloch, but he will bless the sufferers who form the sacrifice. Their patience, their silent heroism, are beyond our praise.

Here are huge cemeteries, long lines of graves, where every morning some are laid to rest, with reverence indeed, but with scant measure of the ritual pomp with which men are wont to pay their final honour to the dead. These have passed, not in a moment amid the roar of battle, but after long bearing of pain, and lonely, with the time for last farewells but none greatly loved to say them to. Yet, standing above the lines of rude coffins, viewing the names and numbers pencilled on the lids, our hearts are lifted up. We know how great it is to lay down life for others. The final wailing notes of the "Last Post" speak our feeling: "Good night. Good-bye. See you again, soon."

Here, among those less worthy, are men who are steadily doing, without much hope of praise, things intolerably monotonous, doing them day after day for years, inspired by what Ruskin calls "the unvexed instinct of duty." Often these are old men, too old for field command. They have spent their lives in the army, have learned, have worked, have waited in the hope that some day their chance would come. Soldiers by profession and desire, they have looked for the great opportunity which the war they foresaw would give. The war came and the opportunity; but came too late for them. They can look for nothing but the dull duties of the base. They do them, enduring minor hardships, facing ceaseless worries, going calmly on, while the great stream of war on which they hoped to float moves on, leaving them behind. With them are others, younger men, who have seen some fighting, have been wounded or broken in health. Often they have struggled hard to secure the posts they hold. They might have gone home. They counted it a desirable thing to be employed still, since actual fighting was impossible, somewhere in touch with fighting men.

I wonder how much Balaam divined of the greatness which, no doubt, was in "the uttermost part" of the host when the king showed it to him. I suppose he understood something of it, for once again, to the indignation of Balak, he blessed instead of cursing. I am sure that any one who has lived long among the men at our bases will feel as I do, that his pride in what is great there far outweighs his disappointment at the other things he saw. I never saw the fighting or the actual front, but even if I had seen nothing else but the fighting I could scarcely feel greater admiration for our officers and men or more love for them.

I have, of course, no tales of adventure to tell. Perhaps I am too old for adventuring, or never had the spirit which makes adventures possible. Yet I own to a certain feeling of disappointment when the doctor who examined me in London told me with almost brutal frankness that he would not allow me to be sent to the front. To France I might go, and even that permission, I think, was a concession. But in France I must remain in places where hardship is not extreme. Doctors are powerful people in the army and in certain matters their word is the supreme law. But fortunately there are always other doctors. And I think I could in the end have managed to get to the very front, in spite of that first man, though he held high rank and was much be-tabbed. But by the time I found out how to get round his prohibition I had become so much interested in my work that I did not want to leave it and even felt grateful to that doctor for sending me to France in the position of a man marked P.B., letters which stand for Permanent Base, and mean that their bearer will not be asked to go where fighting is.

For one other thing I am thankful to the doctor who examined me. He did not ask me to be vaccinated, inoculated, or half-poisoned in any other way. If he had demanded such things of me before I held my commission, I might have had to yield, and I should have disliked the business greatly. Afterwards I remained an unpersecuted heretic and never underwent any of these popular operations. For months, I know, a form was constantly filled up about me and sent to the medical staff of the base at which I was, stating the awful fact that I had escaped the safeguards provided for me, and was still alive. I used to expect that trouble of some sort would arise, but none ever did. Perhaps the authorities were merciful to me because I made no attempt to propagate my opinions; which indeed are scarcely opinions. I should not dream of denying that inoculation of every known kind is excellent for other people, and ought to be rigorously enforced on them. My only strong feeling is that I should escape.

My medical examination was a much more rigorous and unpleasant business than my interview--I can scarcely call this an examination--with my particular chief, the Chaplain-General. He appeared to be satisfied by previous inquiries that I was a fit and proper person--or as little unfit as could reasonably be hoped--to minister to soldiers in France. He took down my answers to half a dozen questions on a sheet of paper which somebody afterwards must have lost, for I had to answer the same questions again by letter after I got to France.

Up to the point of my interview and examination in London, the negotiations with regard to my commission as Chaplain to the Forces were conducted with dignified deliberation. My letters were answered a fortnight or so after they were received. There was no sense of urgency or hurry. We might have been corresponding about a monument to be erected at a remote date to some one still alive and quite young. This, if slightly irritating, gave me a feeling of great confidence in the Chaplains' Department of the War Office. It was evidently a body which worked methodically, carefully, and with due consideration of every step it took. Its affairs were likely to prove efficiently organised. I looked forward to finding myself part of a machine which ran smoothly, whose every cog fitted exactly into the slot designed for it. No part of the War Office was likely at the moment to adopt a German motto; but the Chaplains' Department was plainly inspired by the spirit of Goethe's Ohne haste, ohne raste.

I have heard other men complain that the Department is dilatory, not merely deliberate, and that it is often impossible to get an answer to a letter at all. There is a story told of a man who wrote offering his services as chaplain, wrote again after a decent interval, continued to write for many months, and finally received, by way of reply, a nice little tract--not even on patience, but on conversion. I do not know whether that story is true or not. No tract was ever sent to me, and my letters were answered--after a time.

After my visit to London, the interview, and the examination, the whole spirit of the proceedings changed. I was involved in a worse than American hustle, and found myself obliged to hustle other innocent people, tailors and boot-makers, in order to get together some kind of a kit in time for a start to be made at the shortest possible notice.

I am told that the whole military machine works in this way in dealing with individuals. There is a long period of leisurely and quiet thought--it sometimes appears of complete inertia. Then there is a violent rush, and all sorts of things happen in a minute. I do not know for certain whether officers in other branches of the service suffer in this way. My experience as a chaplain made me feel like a bullet in a gun. For a long time I lay passive, and, except for the anxiety of anticipation, at rest. The man who held the weapon was making up his mind to fire. Then, without any special warning to me, he pulled the trigger, and before I could take a long breath I was flying through space to an unknown destination, without even the comfort of knowing that I had been aimed at any particular object.

But my faith in the Department was unshaken. I remembered the cautious deliberation of the earlier proceedings, and came to the conclusion that whereas there had been for many months an ample supply of chaplains at the front, and a regular flow of reinforcements from home, a sudden and desperate shortage had occurred--owing to casualties in battle, or some kind of pestilence--and that it was necessary to rush new men to the scene of action at the highest speed. This explanation seemed to me reasonable. It did not turn out to be true. There was no particularly urgent demand for chaplains when I reached France.

I am now inclined to think that the Chaplains' Department does its business in this particular way with deliberate intention. It desires first to produce an impression of stability, wisdom, and forethought. It proceeds slowly, and for long periods does not proceed at all. It also wishes its servants to feel that it is vigorous, filled with energy, and working at terrifically high pressure. Then it does things with a rush which would put to shame the managing directors of the New York Underground Railway.

CHAPTER II

GETTING THERE

I made my start from Victoria Station on a January morning. I had worn His Majesty's uniform for no more than two days, and was still uneasily conscious of my strange clothes. I was uncertain about the proper adjustment of straps and buttons. I came for the first time in my life into touch with the army. I, a man of over fifty, went back with a leap to the emotions of forty years before. I was a new boy in a big school.

Others--some who have had the experience and more who have not--have described that start from Victoria or Waterloo. They have said something about the pangs of farewell, though I cannot imagine how any one who has been through it wants to talk about that. They have said a good deal about the thrill of excitement which comes with the beginning of adventure. They have described a certain awe of the unknown. They have tingled with intense curiosity.

I confess chiefly to bewilderment, the discomfort of strangeness and an annoying sense of my own extreme insignificance. I was a new boy. I wanted to behave properly, to do the right thing, and I had no way of knowing what the right thing was. I was absurdly anxious not to "cheek" anybody, and thereby incur the kind of snubbing, I scarcely expected the kicks, which I had endured long ago when I found myself a lonely mite in a corner of the cloisters of my first school.

I sat, with my bundle of papers tucked in beside me, in a corner of a Pullman car. Opposite me was an officer. I recognised, by the look of his Sam Browne belt, that he was an old boy, that he had been there before. I did not know then, being wholly unskilled in pips and badges, what he was. My impression now is that he was an artillery captain, probably returning to the front after leave. It seems ridiculous to be afraid to speak to an artillery captain; but nothing would have induced me to begin a conversation with that man. For all I knew he might have been a general, and it might have been the worst kind of bad form for a mere padre to speak to a general. I even thought of saluting him when I first caught his eye, but I did not know how to salute.

It was he, in the end, who spoke to me. We had reached the end of our train journey and were gathering coats and haversacks from the racks above our heads. I left my papers--Punch and The Bystander--on the seat.

"You ought to take those with you," he said. "You'll find lots of fellows jolly thankful to get them over there."

So I was going to a land where men could not easily come by Punch and The Bystander. In a general way I knew that before he spoke. I had heard of the hardships of war. I was prepared for my share of them. But I had somehow failed to realise that it might be impossible, under certain circumstances, to buy Punch if I wanted it.

The boat, though we arrived beside it early in the morning, did not actually start till afternoon. I might have gone to an hotel and had a comfortable luncheon. I was afraid to do anything of the sort. Military discipline is not a thing to play tricks with. I had made up my mind about that before I started, and in the orders given me for my journey there was not a word about luncheon. I went hungry--foolishly, no doubt.

I heard a story once about a sergeant and several men who were cut off by the Germans from their battalion. They held out for forty hours and were finally rescued. It was found that they had not touched their iron (emergency) ration. Asked why they had gone hungry when they had food in their pockets, the sergeant replied that the eating of iron rations without orders from a superior officer was forbidden. His was a great devotion to discipline--heroic, though foolish. My abstinence was merely foolish. I could not claim that I had any direct orders not to go to an hotel for luncheon.

While I waited on the deck of the steamer I met M. He was alone as I was; but he looked much less frightened than I felt. He was a padre too; but his uniform was not aggressively new. It seemed to me that he might know something about military life. My orders were "to report to the M.L.O." when I landed. I wanted very much to know what that word "report" meant. I wanted still more to know what an M.L.O. was and where a stray voyager would be likely to find him.

It was not difficult to make friends with M. It is never difficult for one padre to make friends with another. All that is necessary by way of introduction is a frank and uncensored expression of opinion about the Chaplains' Department of the War Office. The other man's soul is knit to yours at once. I cannot now remember whether M. or I attacked the subject first. I know we agreed. I suppose it is the same with all branches of the service. Combatant officers are, or used in those days to be, one in heart when discussing the Staff. I never met a doctor who did not think that the medical services are organised by congenital idiots. Every one from the humblest A.S.C. subaltern to the haughtiest guardsman agrees that the War Office is the refuge of incompetents. Padres, perhaps, express themselves more freely than the others. They are less subject to the penalties which threaten those who criticise their superiors. But their opinions are no stronger than those of other people.

Even without that bond of common feeling I think I should have made friends with M. No franker, more straightforward, less selfish man has crossed the sea to France wearing the obscured Maltese Cross which decorates the cap of the padre. It was my first real stroke of luck that I met M. on the deck of that steamer. As it turned out he knew no more than I did about what lay before us. His previous service had been in England and he was going to France for the first time. An M.L.O. was a mystery to him.

But he was cheerful and self-confident. His view was that an exaggerated importance might easily be attached to military orders. If an M.L.O. turned out to be an accessible person, easily recognised, we should report to him and set our consciences at ease. If, on the other hand, the authorities chose to conceal their M.L.O. in some place difficult to find, we should not report to him. Nothing particular would happen either way. So M. thought, and he paced the deck with so springy a step that I began to hope he might be right.

Our passage was abominably rough. M., who dislikes being seasick in public, disappeared. I think what finished him was the sight of an officer in a kilt crawling on his hands and knees across the wet and heaving deck, desperately anxious to get to the side of the ship before his malady reached its crisis. M.'s chair was taken by a pathetic-looking V.A.D. girl, whose condition soon drove me away.

It is one of the mitigations of the horrors of this war that whoever takes part in it is sure to meet friends whom he has lost sight of for years, whom he would probably lose sight of altogether if the chances of war did not bring unexpected meetings. That very first day of my service was rich in its yield of old friends.

When I fled from the sight of the V.A.D.'s pale face, I took to wandering about the decks and came suddenly on a man whom I had last seen at the tiller of a small boat in Clew Bay. I was beating windward across the steep waves of a tideway. His boat was running free with her mainsail boomed out; and he waved a hand to me as he passed. Once again we met at sea; but we were much less cheerful. He was returning to France after leave, to spend the remainder of a second winter in the trenches. He gave it to me as his opinion that life in the Ypres salient was abominable beyond description, and that no man could stand three winters of it. I wanted to ask him questions about military matters, and I might have got some light and leading from him if I had. But somehow we drifted away from the subject and talked about County Mayo, about boats, about islands, and other pleasant things.

M., recovering rapidly from his seasickness, proved his worth the moment we set foot on dry land. He discovered the M.L.O., who seemed a little surprised that we should have taken the trouble to look him up. We left him, and M., still buoyant, found another official known as an R.T.O. He is a man of enormous importance, a controller of the destinies of stray details like ourselves. He told us that we should reach our destination--perhaps I should say our first objective--if we took a train from the Gare Centrale at 6 p.m. We had a good look at the Gare Centrale, to make sure that we should know it again.

Then M. led me off to find a censor. Censors, though I did not know it then, are very shy birds and conceal their nests with the cunning of reed warblers. Hardly any one has ever seen a censor. But M. found one, and we submitted to his scrutiny letters which we had succeeded in writing. After that I insisted on getting something to eat. I had breakfasted at an unholy hour. I had crossed the sea. I had endured great mental strain. I had tramped the streets of an exceedingly muddy town in a downpour of rain. I felt that I must have food and if possible, wine. M. is indifferent to food and hardly ever tastes wine. But he is a kind-hearted man. He agreed to eat with me, though I am sure he would much rather have looked up another official or two, perhaps introduced himself to the Base Commandant.

We went to an hotel, the largest and most imposing in the town, but, as I discovered months afterwards, quite the worst. There I found another friend. Or rather, another friend found me. He was a young man in the uniform of the R.A.M.C. and he rushed at me from the far end of a large salon. I am ashamed to say that I neither recognised him nor knew his name when he told it to me. But there was no doubt of his friendly feelings. He asked me where I was going. I told him, "G.H.Q." It appeared that he had just come from G.H.Q. in a motor. How he came to have control of a motor I do not know. He was a very junior officer, not on anybody's staff and totally unconnected with transport of any kind. He offered us the car and said that we could start any time we liked. He himself was going on leave and the car had to go back to G.H.Q. I had been distinctly told by the R.T.O. to go in a train and--it was my first day in the army--I had a very high idea of the importance of obeying orders. M. laughed at me. So did my other friend.

"Nobody," he said, "cares a pin how you get there, and it doesn't matter when. This week or next, it's all the same. In fact, if I were you I should take a couple of days off and see the country before I reported at G.H.Q."

I know now that I might have done this and that no one would have been surprised or angry if I had. But the new-boy feeling was still strong on me. I was afraid. It seemed to me an awful thing to go for a tour in the war zone in a kidnapped motor, which might for all I knew be a car specially set apart for the use of the Commander-in-Chief.

At 6 o'clock we started in that car, M., I, and a total stranger who emerged from the hotel at the last moment and sat on my valise. There was also the driver and M.'s luggage. M. had a great deal of luggage. We were horribly cramped. It rained with increasing fury. We passed through a region of pallid mud, chalk, I suppose, which covered us and the car with a slimy paste. But I enjoyed the drive. Sentries, French and English, challenged us, and I could see the rain glistening on their bayonets in the light of our lamps. We rushed through villages and intensely gloomy woods. Sign-posts shone white for an instant at cross roads and disappeared. The wind whipped the rain against our faces. The white slime utterly dimmed my spectacles, and I looked out at walls of darkness through frosted glass.

The stranger, balanced perilously on my valise, shouted to me the news that G.H.Q. had been bombed by aeroplanes the day before. It was all that was wanted to complete the sense of adventure. I could have wished for a bomb or two which would miss us, for the sight of a Taube (they were Taubes, not Fokkers or Gothas, in those days) swooping into sight suddenly through the darkness and vanishing again. None came.

We took the advice of our unknown travelling companion and engaged rooms in the hotel he recommended. It was not at all a bad hotel. If we had had any sense or experience, we should have dined and gone straight to bed. That was what M. wanted to do. I suffered from an attack of conscience, and insisted that we ought to report ourselves to the Deputy-Chaplain-General.

"Our orders," I reminded M., "are to report on arrival."

We set out to look for the Deputy-Chaplain-General, M. averring that he had a special talent for finding his way in strange towns at night. Owing to what are officially known as the "unhappy divisions" of the Christian Church, there are two chief chaplains in France. One controls the clergy of the Church of England. The other drives a mixed team of Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and others who owe spiritual allegiance to what is called "The United Board." At that time both these gentlemen had offices in the same town.

In spite of M.'s instinct for locality we came on the wrong one first. Our chief was located in the most obscure corner. We found him at last, or rather we found his office. The good man himself was probably in bed. An orderly invited us to write our names in block capitals, insisting severely on the block capitals, in a large book. Then--he must have recognised that we were new boys and gullible--he said that we ought to report ourselves to some one else called the billeting officer.

The fact that we were already provided with beds made no difference. To the billeting officer we ought to go. It is greatly to our credit that we did. I followed M. through the streets of that town, very narrow streets, very twisty and very badly lighted. I felt as Carruthers did when Davis piloted him across the sand-banks through the fog to Memert. It was 11 o'clock when we found the billeting officer. He was playing bridge and did not in the least want to see us, appeared indeed to think that our visit was unnecessary and troublesome. We left him hurriedly.

Our hotel seemed a home when we got back to it. A friendly subaltern helped us out of a difficulty and increased our knowledge of the French language by telling us that:

"In this country when you want soda water you say 'Oh, gas us.'"

We said it to the damsel behind the bar, and I have seldom been more surprised than I was when she produced a siphon. After that we went to bed.

CHAPTER III

A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE

Next morning we went to see the Deputy-Chaplain-General. It is not right or possible, either in the army or anywhere else, to plunge straight into very august presences. We introduced ourselves first to a staff officer. I was impressed afresh with the way the war throws old acquaintances together. I had taken that staff officer out trout-fishing, when he was a small boy, and he remembered it. He said that Irish trout gave better sport than those in the French rivers, from which I gathered that it was sometimes possible to get a little fishing, in between battles and other serious things. He had also been a college friend of M.'s at Cambridge. He asked us to luncheon and treated us most hospitably. Indeed, I formed an impression that officers, at all events staff officers at G.H.Q., are not badly fed. I have in my time "sat at rich men's feasts." That staff officers' luncheon did not suffer by comparison. M. is, as I said, indifferent to food, but even he was moved to admiration.

"If this," he said afterwards, "is war, the sooner it comes to England the better."

It is pleasant to be treated as an honoured guest, and the friendliness of that officer was reassuring. But I had not yet done with the new-boy feeling. It came on me with full force when I was led into an inner office for an interview with the Deputy-Chaplain-General. He was both a bishop and a general. I have met so many bishops, officially and otherwise, that I am not in the least afraid of them. Nor do generals make me nervous when I am not myself in uniform. But a combination of bishop and general was new to me. I felt exactly as I did in 1875, when Mr. Waterfield of Temple Grove tested my knowledge of Latin to see what class I was fit for.