And the Y.M.C.A. workers are less aggressively prickly than they used to be. The army authorities have weeded out a good many of the original men workers, young students from Free Church theological colleges, and put them into khaki. Their places have been taken by older men, of much larger experience of life, less keen on making good the position of a particular religious denomination. They are often glad to hand over their strictly religious duties to any chaplain who will do them efficiently. The women workers, a far more numerous class, never were so difficult, from the Church of England chaplain's point of view, as the men. They are, in the fullest sense, voluntary workers. They even pay all their own expense, lodging, board, and travelling. They must be women of independent means. I do not know why it is, but well-off people are seldom as eager about emphasising sectarian differences as those who have to work for small incomes. Perhaps they have more chance of getting interested in other things. It is, I fear, true that the decay of the sectarian--that is to say undenominational--spirit in the Y.M.C.A. has resulted in a certain blurring of the "soul" side of the red triangle. This has been a cause of uneasiness to the society's authorities at home, and various efforts have been made to stimulate the spiritual work of the huts and to inquire into the causes of its failure. I am inclined to think that the matter is quite easily understood. There is less aggressive religiosity in Y.M.C.A. huts than there used to be, because the society is more and more drawing its workers from a class which instinctively shrinks from slapping a strange man heartily on the back and greeting him with the inquiry--"Tommy, how's your soul?" There is no need for anxiety about the really religious work of the huts. That in most places is being done. CHAPTER IX Y.S.C. "Y.S.C." stands for Young Soldiers' Club, an institution which had a short, but, I think, really useful existence in the large camp where I was first stationed. There were in that camp large numbers of boys--at one time nearly a thousand of them--all enlisted under age in the early days of the recruiting movement, all of them found by actual trial or judged beforehand to be unfit for the hardship of life in the trenches. They were either sent down from their battalions to the base or were stopped on the way up. For some time their number steadily increased. Like the children of Israel in Egypt, who also multiplied rapidly, they became a nuisance to the authorities.