The army authorities have been laughed at since the war began on account of their passion for inverting the names of things. You must not, if you want such a thing, say one pot of raspberry jam. You say, instead, jam, raspberry, pot, one. It is odd that in the few cases in which such inversion is really desirable the authorities refuse to practise it. Horse Transport, Base, would be intelligible after thought. Base Horse Transport, till you get accustomed to it, seems a gratuitous insult to a number of worthy animals, not perhaps highly bred but strong and active. Base Detail is another example of the same thing. To describe a man as a detail is bad enough. To call him a Base Detail must lower his self-respect, and as a rule these poor fellows have done nothing to deserve it. A Base Details Camp contains, for the most part, men who have just recovered from wounds received in the service of King and Country. "Details" perhaps is unavoidable, but it would surely be possible to conform to the ordinary army usage and call the place Camp, Details, Base. My fate was more fortunate than M.'s. I had no church--he had the better of me there--but I was put into a homogeneous camp, an Infantry Base. (Our colonel was a masterful man. He would not have allowed us to be called Base Infantry.) There was a small permanent staff in the camp, the colonel, the adjutant, the doctor, and myself among the officers, a sergeant-major, an orderly-room staff, and a few others among the men. Every one else passed in and out of the camp, coming to us from England in drafts, or from hospitals as details, going from us as drafts into the mists of the front. Our camp occupied the place of a reservoir in a city's water supply. The men and officers flowed in to us from many sources, stayed a while and flowed out again through the conduits of troop trains when the insatiable fighting army, perpetually using and losing men, turned on its taps, demanding fresh supply. It happened, I do not know why, that there had never been a chaplain specially attached to that camp before. I have no reason to suppose that a chaplain had been asked for or was specially desired. I expected, at best, to be tolerated as a necessary evil; at worst to be made to feel that I was a nuisance. I was, in fact, extremely kindly received. My experience is that a chaplain is almost always well received both by officers and men in France, and is very much less a stranger than a parson at home who finds himself in a club where he is not well known. But I do not pretend that my first evening in that mess was a particularly comfortable one. As it happened, neither the colonel nor the adjutant was there. I had as companions half a dozen officers, any one of whom was young enough to be my son. They were laboriously polite and appallingly respectful. We talked to each other in restrained whispers and I do not think that any one laughed during the whole course of dinner.