war had brought him the chance of escape back to an almost solely physical life, like his own happy youth of rude health, only better: a life all salt and tingling with vicissitudes of simple bodily discomfort and pleasure, fatigue and rest, risk and the ceasing of risk; a heaven after the flatness, the tedium, the cloying security and the confounded moral problems attending the uninspired practice of professional brightness and breeziness in an uncritical parish. He abounded so much that whenever now one hears the words "army chaplain" his large, genial image springs up of itself in the mind. II In the eyes of the men he had notable merits. He was a running fountain, more often than not, of good cigarettes. Of the exceeding smallness of Low Country beer he could talk, man to man, with knowledge and right feeling. He gladly frequented the least healthy parts of the line, and would frankly mourn the pedantry which denied him a service revolver and did not even allow him the grievous ball-headed club with which a mediæval bishop felt himself free to take his own part in a war, because with this lethal tool he did not exactly shed blood, though he dealt liberally enough in contused wounds that would serve equally well. Having a caste of his own, not precisely the combatant officer's, he had a tongue less rigidly tied in the men's hearing, so he could soothe the couch of a wounded sergeant by telling him, with a diverting gusto, how downily the old colonel, the one last ungummed, had timed his enteric inoculation at home so as to rescue himself from the fiery ordeal of a divisional field-day. These were solid merits. And yet there was something about this type of chaplain--he had his counterpart in all the churches--with which the common men-at-arms would privily and temperately find a little fault. He seemed to be only too much afraid of having it thought that he was anything more than one of themselves. He had, with a vengeance, "no clerical nonsense about him." The vigour with which he threw off the parson and put on the man and the brother did not always strike the original men and brothers as it was intended. Your virilist chaplain was apt to overdo, to their mind, his jolly implied disclaimers of any compromising connection with kingdoms not of this world. For one thing, he was, for the taste of people versed in carnage, a shade too fussily bloodthirsty. Nobody made such a point of aping your little trench affectations of callousness; nobody else was so anxious to keep you assured that the blood of the enemy smelt as good to his nose as it could to any of yours. In the whole blood-and-iron province of talk he would not only outshine any actual combatant--that is quite easy to do--but he would outshine any colonel who lived at a base. I never met a regimental officer or "other rank" who wanted a day more of the war for himself, his friends or his country after the Armistice. But I