Services were never things you could be quite sure of until they came off. Often I have gone to bed on Saturday night feeling that everything had been done in the way of arranging for the following day. Battalions had been notified, adjutants had put the hours of service in orders, and places for the gatherings had been carefully located. Then on the following day, to my intense disgust, I would find that all my plans had been frustrated. Some general had taken it into his head to order an inspection, or some paymaster had been asked to come down and pay off the men. The Paymaster's Parade, in the eyes of the men, took precedence of everything else. A Church Service was nowhere in comparison. More often than I can recollect, all my arrangements for services have been upset by a sudden order for the men to go to a bathing parade. Every time this happened, the Adjutant would smile and tell me, as if I had never heard it before, that "cleanliness was next to godliness." A chaplain therefore had his trials, but in spite of them it was the policy of wisdom not to show resentment and to hold one's tongue. I used to look at the Adjutant, and merely remark quietly, in the words of the Psalmist, "I held my tongue with bit and bridle, while the ungodly was in my sight." People at Headquarters soon got accustomed to my absence and never gave me a thought. I used to take comfort in remembering Poo Bah's song in the Mikado, "He never will be missed, he never will be missed." Sometimes when I have started off from home in the morning my sergeant and Ross have asked me when I was going to return. I told them that if they would go down on their knees and pray for illumination on the subject, they might find out, but that I had not the slightest idea myself. A visit to the trenches was most fascinating. I used to take Philo with me. He found much amusement in hunting for rats, and would often wander off into No Man's Land and come back covered with the blood of his victims. One night I had missed him for some time, and was whistling for him, when a sentry told me that a white dog had been "captured" by one of the men with the thought that it was a German police dog, and he had carried it off to company headquarters under sentence of death. I hurried up the trench and was just in time (p. 105) to save poor little Philo from a court martial. There had been a warning in orders that day against the admission of dogs from the German lines.