a battle, or stand by the
operating tables and the long rows of cots in the hospitals, or share
in sympathy the hardship and suffering of the men who are fighting for
us, and remain unmoved. The man must be dead of soul to whom the war
does not present a mighty moral challenge. It arraigns our past manner
of life and our very civilization. It gives us a new angle of
observation, a new point of view, a new test of values. It furnishes a
possible moral judgment by which we can weigh our life in the balance
and see where we have been found wanting.

These brief sketches are only fragmentary and have of necessity been
hastily written. The writer has been asked to state his impression of
the work among the men in France. He did not go there to write but to
work. He has tried simply to state what he saw and to leave the reader
to draw his own conclusions. A mere statement of the grim facts at the
front, if they are not sugar-coated or glossed over, may not be
pleasant reading, but it is unfair to those at home that they should
not know the hard truth of the reality of things as they are.

Before the war broke out, it was the writer's privilege to make an
extended tour for work among students in Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria,
Serbia, and Greece, and to visit Germany. Since the declaration of
war, he has visited France, Italy, and Egypt, and has observed the
effect of the war throughout Asia, in tours extending over nearly the
whole of China and India. Last year he was in the British camps among
the soldiers of England, Scotland, and Wales. Since America declared
war he has been working with the various divisions of the British and
American armies in France, from the great base camps, where hundreds of
thousands of men are in training, up to the front with the men in the
trenches.

For the sake of those who will follow with deep interest the boys who
are already in France, or who will shortly be there, brief accounts are
given of the various phases of a soldier's life in the base camps, the
training school of the "Bull Ring," at the front, and in the hospitals.

CHAPTER I

AT THE FRONT

In the midst of our work at a base camp, there came a sudden call to go
"up the line" to the great battle front. Leaving the railway, we took
a motor and pressed on over the solidly paved roads of France, which
are now pulsing arteries of traffic, crowded with trains of motor
transports pouring in their steady stream of suppl