,000, and after two years of the war 1,500 such
centers were in full swing. The area of operations includes the
British Isles, Egypt, the Dardanelles, Malta, the Mediterranean ports,
India, Mesopotamia, East and South Africa, Canada, Australia, and out
to the last limits of Britain's far flung battle line.

The Y M C A has a strong homing instinct, aiming to provide "a home
away from home." In the dugouts behind the trenches, in the deserts of
Egypt, or in the jungles of Africa, it has been forced to make a home
in every kind of shelter. It was significant that its first three
successive dwelling places seventy years ago were a little bedroom, a
coffee house, and a room in a tavern. During the present war, one may
see Associations in actual operation along the fighting line in France,
in a cowshed, a pigsty, a stable, a hop-house, dugouts under the earth;
in battered and ruined buildings in Flanders; in tents in the Sahara
and on the ancient Peninsula of Mt. Sinai; at the bases of the big
battle fleets; in the rest houses of the flying corps; on the Bourse in
Cairo; in hotels taken over in Switzerland and France, and in the great
Crystal Palace of London. In four centers it has used and transformed
a brewery, a saloon, a theater, and a museum. Its dwellings stretch
away from the tents of "Caesar's Camp," where the Roman Julius lauded
in 55 B. C., on the southern shores of Britain, to the far north, in
the new naval institute at Invergordon, erected for the sailors of the
Grand Fleet at a cost of more than $20,000. They range from the
battered dugouts at the front in France to the Shakespeare hut in
London, costing more than $30,000. They stretch from the rest huts of
the great metropolis, with sleeping and feeding accommodations for some
ten thousand men a day during the dangerous period of leave in London,
away to the hut in "Plug Street" Woods, recently blown to atoms by a
shell, where the secretary escaped by a few seconds and returned to
find literally nothing left save the rims of his spectacles and two
coins melted and fused together by the terrific heat of the explosion.
Several of the secretaries and workers have been killed by shell fire,
or in transit by torpedoes from submarines, while other Association men
have received the Victoria Cross for heroism in action.

Let us visit a typical hut to grasp the significance of its work, in
order that we may realize what is going on in the fifteen hundred
simi