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 gener