an attendant chaplain, and a very good sort he usually is.  Is the soldier sick, he visits him; penitent, he shrives him; dying, he comforts him.  One such I knew, a Catholic priest, six feet two, and a mighty hunter of buck in his day, who was often longing for a shot at the Huns, and as often imposing penances upon himself for such un-ghostly desires.  He found consolation in confessing the Irishmen before they went into the trenches:  “The bhoys fight all the better for it,” he explained.  He was sure of the salvation of his flock; the only doubts he had were about his own.  We all loved him.

There is one great difference between life in billets and life in the trenches.  In billets the soldier “grouses” often, in trenches never.  This may be partly due to a very proper sense of proportion; it may also be due to the fact that, the necessity for vigilance being relaxed and the occasions for industry few, life in billets is apt to become a great bore.  The small Flemish and French towns offer few amenities; in our mess we found our principal recreation in reunions with other fraternities at the patisserie or in an occasional mount.  Of patisseries that at Bethune is the best; that at Poperinghe the worst.  Besides, the former has a piano and a most pleasing Mademoiselle.  In the earlier stages of our occupation some of the officers at G.H.Q. did a little coursing and shooting, but there was trouble about delits de chasse, and now you are allowed to shoot nothing but big game—­namely, Germans—­although I have heard of an irresponsible Irishman in the trenches who vaulted the parapet to bag a hare and, what is more remarkable, returned with it.  Needless to say, his neighbours were Saxons.  As for the men, their opportunities of relaxation are more circumscribed.  Much depends on the house in which they are billeted.  If there is a baby, you can take the part of mother’s help; one of the most engaging sights I saw was a troop of our cavalrymen (they may have been the A.V.C.) riding through Armentieres, leading a string of remounts, each remount with a laughing child on its back.  Or, again, you can wash.  If you are not fortunate enough to be billeted at Bailleul, which has the latest thing in baths, enabling men to be baptized, like Charlemagne’s reluctant converts, in platoons, you can always find a pump.  The spectacle of our men stripped to the waist sousing each other with water under the pump is a source of standing wonder to the inhabitants.  I am not sure whether they think it indecent, or merely eccentric; perhaps both.  But then, as Anatole France has gravely remarked, a profound disinclination to wash is no proof of chastity.  Besides, as one of the D.M.S.’s encyclicals has reminded us, cleanliness of body is next to orderliness of kit.  If you take carbolic baths you may, with God’s grace, escape one or more of the seven plagues of Flanders.  These seven are lice, flies, rats, rain, mud, smells, and “souvenirs.”  The greatest of these is lice, for lice may mean cerebro-meningitis.  Owing to their unsportsmanlike and irritating habits they are usually called “snipers.”  But, unlike snipers, they are not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war (their habits partake too much of espionage), and when captured they receive a short shrift from an impassive man with a hot iron in the asbestos drying-room.