“I am sorry you have had to wait so long, old chap.  We’re doing our best.  We’ll get to you as soon as we can.”

“Never mind me,” said the man; “carry on!”

As the sun came out he unbuttoned his coat, and when the coat was thrown back my friend saw that he was wearing a colonel’s uniform.

“I am sorry, sir,” said my friend.  “I did not know.  I oughtn’t to have spoken to you in that familiar way.”

“You have earned the right to say anything you like to me,” said the Colonel.  “Go right on.”

And then my friend said, “Well, come with me, sir, to the back, and I will get you a cup of coffee.”

“No, not a minute before the boys.  I’ll take my turn with them.”

That’s the spirit.  Your boys, I say, are great stuff.  They have their follies.  They can go to the devil if they want to, but tens of thousands of them don’t want to, and hundreds of thousands are living straight in spite of their surroundings.  They are the bravest, dearest boys that God ever gave to the world, and you and I ought to be proud of them.  If the people at home were a tenth as grateful as they ought to be they would crowd into our churches, if it were for nothing else but to pray for and give thanks for the boys.

They are just great, your boys.  They saved your homes.  I was recently in a city in France which had before the war a population of 55,000 people.  When I was there, there were not 500 people in that city—­54,500 were homeless refugees, if they weren’t killed.  I walked about that city for a month, searching for a house that wasn’t damaged, a window that wasn’t broken, and I never found one.  The whole of that city will have to be rebuilt.  A glorious cathedral, a magnificent pile of municipal buildings, all in ruins; the Grande Place, a meeting-place for the crowned heads of Europe, gone!  “Thou hast made of a city a heap”—­a heap of rubbish. Your city would have been like that but for the boys in khaki.

I was saying my prayers in a corner of an old broken chateau, the Y.M.C.A. headquarters for that centre, with my trench-coat buttoned tight and my big muffler round my ears.  Presently I heard some one say—­one of the workers—­“A gentleman wants to see you, sir,” and when I got downstairs there was a General, a V.C., a D.S.O., and a Star of India man—­a glorious man, a beautiful character.  He was there with his Staff-captain, and he said,

“I’ve come to invite you to dinner to-morrow night, Mr. Smith.  I want you to come to the officers’ mess.”

“What time, sir?” I asked.  “I cannot miss my meeting at half-past six with the boys.”

“Well, the mess will be at half-past seven.  We will arrange that.”

“Before you go, sir, I should like to ask why you are interested in me.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, if you wish,” he said.  “Men are writing home to their wives, mothers, sweethearts, and they are talking about a new power in their lives.  ’We have got something that is helping us to go straight and play the game,’ they write.  And so,” said the General, “we should like to have a chat with you.”