ur home for a good long
time, so we settled down to our life there. We had visits from Sir Sam
Hughes and Sir Robert Borden, and also Lord Kitchener. I was not
present when the latter inspected the men, but I asked one who (p. 103)
was there what it was like. "Oh Sir," he replied, "we stood to
attention, and Kitchener passed down the lines very quietly and
coldly. He merely looked at us with his steely grey eyes and said to
himself, "I wonder how many of these men will be in hell next week."
General Hughes' inspection of one of the battalions near Ploegsteert
Wood was interrupted by shells and the men were hastily dismissed.

A visit to the trenches was now a delightful expedition. All the way
from Nieppe to Hill 63 one came upon the headquarters of some unit. At
a large farm called "Lampernise Farm" all the transports of the 3rd
Brigade were quartered. I used to have services for them in the open
on a Sunday evening. It was very difficult at first to collect a
congregation, so I adopted the plan of getting two or three men who
could sing, and then going over with them to an open place in the
field, and starting some well known hymn. One by one others would come
up and hymn-books were distributed. By the time the service was
finished, we generally had quite a good congregation, but it took a
certain amount of courage and faith to start the service. One felt
very much like a little band of Salvationists in a city square.

In spite of having a horse to ride, it was sometimes difficult to
cover the ground between the services on Sunday. One afternoon, when I
had been to the Cavalry Brigade at Petit Moncque Farm, I had a great
scramble to get back in time to the transport lines. In a bag hanging
over the front of my saddle, I had five hundred hymn books. Having
taken a wrong turn in the road I lost some time which it was necessary
to make up, and, in my efforts to make haste, the string of the bag
broke and hymn books fluttered out and fell along the road. Dandy took
alarm, misunderstanding the nature of the fluttering white things, and
started to gallop. With two haversacks on my back it was difficult to
hold on to the bag of hymn books and at the same time to prevent their
loss. The more the hymn books fluttered out, the harder Dandy bolted,
and the harder Dandy bolted, the more the hymn books fluttered out. At
last I passed a soldier in the road and asked him to come to my
assistance. I managed to rein in the horse,