A private who quotes Latin in the waggon of a troop train. A battered soldier who reads Greek for his own pleasure in the trenches, is more surprising still. The Baron Bradwardwine took Livy into battle with him. But there must be ten men who can read Livy for every one who can tackle Herodotus without a dictionary. A piano is an essential part of the equipment of a recreation hut in France. The soldier loves to make music, and it is surprising how many soldiers can make music of a sort. Pity is wasted on inanimate things. Otherwise one's heart's sympathy would go out to those pianos. It would be a dreadful thing for an instrument of feeling to have "Irish Eyes," "The Only Girl in the World," and "Home Fires," played on it every day and all day long. I am not, I am often thankful for it, acutely musical. But there have been times in Y.M.C.A. huts when I felt I should shriek if I heard the tune of "Home Fires" again. I was playing chess one afternoon with a man who was beating me. I became so much absorbed in the game that I actually ceased to hear the piano. Then, after a while I heard it again, played in quite an unusual manner. The player had got beyond "Irish Eyes" and the rest of those tunes. He was playing, with the tenderest feeling, one of Chopin's Nocturnes. He asked me afterwards if I could by any means borrow for him a volume of Beethoven, one which contained the "Waldstein" if possible. He confessed that he could not play the "Waldstein" without the score. He was an elderly man, elderly compared to most of those round him. He was in the R.E., a sapper. There must be scores of musicians of taste and culture in the army. I wonder if there was another employed in laying out roads behind the Somme front. I gained a reputation, wholly undeserved, as a chess player while I was in that camp, and I was generally able to put up some sort of fight against my opponents even if they beat me in the end. But I was utterly defeated by one man, a Russian. He could speak no English and very little French. He belonged to a Canadian regiment, but how he got into it or managed to live with his comrades I do not know. He and I communicated with each other only by moving the pieces on the chess board. I suppose he was a member of the Russian Church, but on Sundays he attended the services which I conducted. He used to sit as near me as he could and I always found his places for him. He could not read English any more than he could speak it, so the Prayer Book cannot have been much use to him. But there was no priest of his own church anywhere within reach, and he was evidently a religious man. I suppose he found the Church of England service better than none at all.