periority which has had
a good deal to do with the dislike of the Church, which has been I
imagine, a much more effective cause of "our unhappy divisions" than
any of the doctrines men have professed to quarrel about.

And the Y.M.C.A. workers are less aggressively prickly than they used
to be. The army authorities have weeded out a good many of the
original men workers, young students from Free Church theological
colleges, and put them into khaki. Their places have been taken by
older men, of much larger experience of life, less keen on making
good the position of a particular religious denomination. They are
often glad to hand over their strictly religious duties to any
chaplain who will do them efficiently.

The women workers, a far more numerous class, never were so
difficult, from the Church of England chaplain's point of view, as
the men. They are, in the fullest sense, voluntary workers. They even
pay all their own expense, lodging, board, and travelling. They must
be women of independent means. I do not know why it is, but well-off
people are seldom as eager about emphasising sectarian differences as
those who have to work for small incomes. Perhaps they have more
chance of getting interested in other things.

It is, I fear, true that the decay of the sectarian--that is to say
undenominational--spirit in the Y.M.C.A. has resulted in a certain
blurring of the "soul" side of the red triangle. This has been a
cause of uneasiness to the society's authorities at home, and various
efforts have been made to stimulate the spiritual work of the huts
and to inquire into the causes of its failure. I am inclined to think
that the matter is quite easily understood. There is less aggressive
religiosity in Y.M.C.A. huts than there used to be, because the
society is more and more drawing its workers from a class which
instinctively shrinks from slapping a strange man heartily on the
back and greeting him with the inquiry--"Tommy, how's your soul?"
There is no need for anxiety about the really religious work of the
huts. That in most places is being done.

CHAPTER IX

Y.S.C.

"Y.S.C." stands for Young Soldiers' Club, an institution which had a
short, but, I think, really useful existence in the large camp where
I was first stationed. There were in that camp large numbers of
boys--at one time nearly a thousand of them--all enlisted under age
in the early days of the recruiting movement, all of them found by
actua