Preaching to soldiers, as I soon learned, was a very different thing from addressing a civilian congregation. The very appearance of the group and place was odd to a minister from civil life--young men in olive drab, sitting on the rough benches of a welfare hut or grouped about in a comfortable circle on the grass of a French pasture. The group was homogeneous to an extent elsewhere impossible, as all were men, all were young, and all were engaged in the same work and had the same interests. The congregation and the preaching became specialized; the work became narrower but more directly applicable to the individual than in civil life. The soldiers had unusual experiences and interests as their common background; their needs were different from those of any group of civilians, in or out of a church or synagogue. They were soldiers and had to be understood and approached as such. The circumstances of our services were never twice the same. I have led groups in worship in huts of the Y. M. C. A., K. of C., and J. W. B.; in chateaux, army offices, and barns; yes, and out of doors in the rain. I have come to a Y. M. C. A. and found it full, taking my group for an announced service to the stage and lowering the curtain for privacy. Once, in a great brick building used by the "Y," I found the place occupied by a miscellaneous crowd of a thousand men, reading, writing, playing checkers, lined up at the canteen for candy and cigarettes. My services had been announced and my fifty men were present, some of them after a five-mile walk. The secretary in charge and I walked about to find a vacant spot and finally found one, the prize ring. So I called for attention, announced my service, and held it in the prize ring, with my men seated on benches in the ring itself. The non-Jews near by stopped their reading or writing to listen to the little sermon, so that my actual audience was considerably larger than my group of worshipers. I remember one week-day evening when I came to a J. W. B. hut in a camp near Le Mans for an announced service only to find the place packed to the doors. On inquiry, for such a crowd was unprecedented in this particular camp, I found that a minstrel show had been unexpectedly obtained and was to run later in the evening. So, while the actors were making up behind the curtain, I held forth in front, and when the show was announced as ready, a couple of Irish soldiers and a Swede pushed to one side and made a little room for me in the front row.