They pronounce it “_Egrec, Em, Say, Ah_,” and most of them have not the slightest idea of what the letters mean, but they highly approve of the thing itself. In the towns and cities they flock to the Y. M. C. A. entertainments, especially the military band concerts. There is very little music in France just now, aside from our bands. The Y. M. C. A. hut and canteen does its greatest work in the isolated camps where the soldiers are cut off from all other recreation. I remember a hut in one of our largest aviation camps, miles away from any town or village. Life in an aviation camp is something like working in a planing mill. The sound of hundreds of aeroplane motors goes on in a ceaseless clatter for hours every day. There is always a strong wind blowing because aviation camps are located on the biggest, emptiest treeless plains that can be found. The particular aviation camp of which I write was on the widest, flattest plain in France, I should think. There were not nearly enough machines there when I visited it in early April, and the men had very little to do. Hundreds of our flyers in France have never had a chance to do any flying at all, and in this camp, as they said, “If a fellow got a hop once a week he was lucky.” What those boys would have done without their Y. M. C. A. hut I can not imagine. The secretary had been a professor of mathematics in a college somewhere. He was a middle aged, intellectual, rather shy man, and at first I wondered why he had been appointed to such a post. But when I saw him in a crowd of soldiers I no longer wondered. He was easy, genial, sympathetic, tactful, what the politicians call a perfect mixer. When he stood up to introduce the speaker of the evening the boys stamped their feet and whistled through their fingers like kids. “How will you ever go back to teaching mathematics after this?” I asked him. “I never will go back,” he replied. “I’m going to be human for the rest of my life.” He was being human in that camp so successfully that he almost succeeded in offsetting the lack of planes. At least, he did wonders in keeping alive the spirit of courage and hopefulness among the men. A dozen miles or so from a large southern seaport where many thousands of our men are at work I visited another Y. M. C. A. place, one which has become the social center of an entire French town. In the big town there is a flourishing Y. M. C. A., and when the building camps began to string along the river harbor for miles the secretary in charge saw that extension of the work would have to be made.