We reached H. at 10 p.m., almost as fagged and quite as dirty as that major. I had already learned something. I was determined not to report myself to any one until I had washed, slept, and eaten. It was snowing heavily when we arrived. With the help of a military policeman whom we met we found an hotel. He told us that it was a first-rate place; but he was no judge of hotels. It was very far from being good. We had, however, every reason to be thankful to that policeman. We secured two beds. While we were smoking our final pipes, two young officers turned up. They had been round all the good hotels in the town and failed to find accommodation. They failed again in our hotel. We had engaged the last two beds. They went off sadly to sleep on the platform in the railway station. If our policeman had known more about hotels and sent us to a good one, it might very well have been our fate to sleep on the platform. Next morning, M., who is extraordinarily persevering, secured a bath. It is a great advantage when in France not to know any French. M. is wholly unaffected when the proprietor of an hotel, the proprietor's wife, the head waiter, and several housemaids assure him with one voice that a bath is _tout a fait impossible_. He merely smiles and says: "Very well then, bring it along or show me where it is." In the end he gets it, and, fortunate in his companionship, so do I. CHAPTER IV SETTLING DOWN There are, or used to be, people who believe that you can best teach a boy to swim by throwing him into deep water from the end of a pier and leaving him there. If he survives, he has learned to swim and the method has proved its value. If he drowns, his parents have no further anxiety about him. The authorities who are responsible for the religion of the army believe in this plan for teaching chaplains their business. Having accepted a civilian parson as a volunteer, they dump him down in a camp without instruction or advice, without even so much as a small red handbook on field tactics to guide him. There he splutters about, makes an ass of himself in various ways, and either hammers out some plan for getting at his job by many bitter failures, or subsides into the kind of man who sits in the mess-room with his feet on the stove, reading novels and smoking cigarettes--either learns to swim after a fashion or drowns unlamented. M., who had at all events three months' English experience behind him, found himself on the top of a steep hill, the controller of a wooden church planted in the middle of a sea of sticky mud. He ministered to a curiously mixed assortment of people, veterinary men, instructors in all kind of military arts, A.S.C. men, and the men of a camp known as Base Horse Transport.