gers to face and trials to
endure.

From his intimate talk we may guess that the soldier thinks very
little about himself and very much about those he has left behind. He
says little of what his life has been, less still about that to which
he looks forward. His mind is altogether occupied with the little
affairs of his home life, with the marriage of this friend, the wages
earned by son or daughter, the thousand details of life in some
English village or some great city. Sometimes we hear an expression
of pleasure at the thought of joining again comrades by whose side
the writer has fought. Sometimes an anticipation from a young soldier
of seeing in the fighting-line some friend who has gone there before
him.

It is not thus that an imaginative writer would represent the talk of
soldiers who say farewell. I suppose that those who speak as these
men do are lovers of peace and quiet ways, have no great taste for
adventuring, find war not a joy but a hard necessity. Yet as we know,
as all Europe knows now, there are no better fighters in the world
than these citizen soldiers whose blood the bugle stirs but
sluggishly, whose hearts are all the time with those whom they have
left at English firesides.

CHAPTER VIII

WOODBINE HUT

I knew many recreation huts, Y.M.C.A. huts, Church Army huts, E.F.
canteens, while I was in France. I was in and out of them at all
sorts of hours. I lectured in them, preached in them, told stories,
played games, and spent in the aggregate many hours listening to
other people singing, reciting, lecturing. It was always a pleasure
to be in these huts and I liked every one of them. But I cherish
specially tender recollections of Woodbine Hut. It was the first I
knew, the first I ever entered, my earliest love among huts. Also its
name was singularly attractive. It is not every hut which has a name.
Many are known simply by the number of the camp they belong to, and
even those which have names make, as a rule, little appeal to the
imagination. It is nice and loyal to call a hut after a princess, for
instance, or by the name of the donor, or after some province or
district at home, whose inhabitants paid for the hut. One is no way
moved by such names.

But Woodbine! The name had nothing whatever to do with the soldier's
favourite cigarette, though that hut, or any other, might very well
be called after tobacco. I, a hardened smoker, have choked in the
atmosphere of these huts worse t