"That is true, sir," said the M. O., joining in the talk, "but there is something more. Frankly, my opinion is that the biggest thing, sir, with some of us in Canada, is not that the motherland was in need of help, though, of course, we all feel that, but that the freedom of the world is threatened, and that Canada, as one of the free nations of the world, must do her part in its defence."

"A fine spirit," said the old gentleman.

"This fight," continued the M. O., "is ours, you see, as well as yours, and we hate a bully."

The old salt swore a great oath, and said:

"You are pups of the old breed, and you run true to type. I'm glad to know you, gentlemen," he continued, shaking them warmly by the hand.

After they had gone a few steps he called Barry back to him.

"That's my card, sir. I should like you to come to see me in London sometime when you are on leave."

Barry glanced at the card and read, "Commander Howard Vincent, R. N. R."

"It was very decent of the old boy," he said to the Commanding Officer afterwards, when recounting the interview. "I don't suppose I'll ever use the card, but I do think he really meant it."

"Meant it," exclaimed the Commanding Officer. "Why, Dunbar, I'm an old country man, and I know. Make no mistake. These people, and especially these naval people, do not throw their cards loosely about. You will undoubtedly hear from him."

"It's not likely," replied Barry, "but the old gentleman is great stuff, all right."

During the long, sunny spring day, their dinky little train whisked them briskly through the sweet and restful beauty of the English southern counties. To these men, however, from the wide sunbaked, windswept plains of western Canada, the English landscape suggested a dainty picture, done in soft greys and greens, with here and there a vivid splash of colour, where the rich red soil broke through the green. But its tiny fields set off with hedges, and lines of trees, its little, clean-swept villages, with their picturesque church spires, its parks with deer that actually stood still to look at you, its splendid manor houses, and, at rare intervals, its turreted castles, gave these men, fresh from the raw, unmeasured and unmade west, a sense of unreality. To them it seemed a toy landscape for children to play with, but, as they passed through the big towns and cities with their tall, clustering chimneys, their crowding populations, with unmistakable evidences of great wealth, their shipping, where the harbours bit into the red coast line, there began to waken in them the thought that this tiny England, so beautifully finished, and so neatly adorned, was something mightier than they had ever known.

In these tiny fields, in these clean swept villages, in these manor houses, in these castles, in factory and in shipyard, were struck deep the roots of an England whose greatness they had never yet guessed.

The next afternoon brought them to the great military camp at Shorncliffe, in a misty rain, hungry, for their rations had been exhausted early in the day, weary from ship and train travel, and eager to get their feet once again on mother earth.

At the little station they were kept waiting in a pouring rain for something to happen, they knew not what. The R. T. O., a young Imperial officer, blase with his ten months of war in England, had some occult reason for delaying their departure. So, while the night grew every moment wetter and darker, the men sat on their kit-bags or found such shelter as they could in the tiny station, or in the lee of the "goods trains" blocking the railroad tracks, growing more indignant and more disgusted with the British high command, the war in general, and registering with increasing intensity vows of vengeance against the Kaiser, who, in the last analysis, they considered responsible for their misery.

At length the "brass hat" for whom they had been waiting appeared upon the scene, not in the slightest degree apologetic, but very businesslike, and with a highly emphasised military manner. After a little conversation between the brass hat and their Commanding Officer, the latter gave the command and off they set in the darkness for their first route march on English soil.

Through muddy roads and lanes, over fields, slushy and sodden, up hill and down dale, they plodded steadily along. At the rear of the column marched Barry with the M. O.

Long before they reached their destination, their conversation had given out, the M. O. sucking sullenly at his pipe, the bowl upside down. The rear end of the column was very frayed and straggling. Why it is that a perfectly fit company will invariably fray out if placed at the rear of a marching column, no military expert has quite succeeded in satisfactorily explaining.

As he tramped along in the dark by the side of the road, the M. O.

stumbled over a soldier sitting upon the soggy bank.

"Who are you?" he inquired shortly.

"Corporal Thom, sir."

"What's the matter with you?"

"I'm all in, sir. I've been sick all day, sir."

"Why didn't you report sick, then? Can't you get on?"

"I don't think so, sir. Not for a while, at least."

"Have you any pain, any nausea?"

"No, sir, I'm just all in."

"Do you know our route?"

"Yes, sir, I've got the turns down."

"Well, come along then when you can. I'll send back a waggon later, but don't wait for that."

"Yes, sir," said Corporal Thom.

"Come on, Dunbar! We'll send a waggon back for these stragglers. There will be a good many of them before long."

"You go on, doc. I'll come later," said Barry. "I'll catch up to you."

But the M. O., at the various halts, waited in vain for the chaplain to appear.

On arriving at the camp, after a long struggle, he succeeded in sending back an Army Service waggon to bring in the stragglers, but just as the waggon was about to leave, he heard coming up the road, a party stepping out briskly to the music of their own whistling. In the rear of the party marched the chaplain, laden down with one man's rifle and another man's kit-bag.

"They're all here, sir," said Corporal Thom to the M. O., with a distinct note of triumph in his voice. "All here, sir," he repeated, as he observed the sergeant major standing at the doctor's side.

"Well done, corporal," said the sergeant major. "You brought 'em all in? That means that no man has fallen out on our first march in this country."

The corporal made no reply, but later on, he explained the matter to the sergeant major.

"It's that Sky Pilot of ours, sir," he said. "Blowed if he'd let us fall out."

"Kept you marching, eh?"

"No, it's his chocolate and his jaw, but more his jaw than his chocolate. He's got lots of both. I was all in. I'd been sick all day in the train. Couldn't eat a bite. Well, the first thing, he gives me a cake of his chocolate. Then he sets himself down in the mud beside me, and me wishin' all the time he'd go on and leave me for the waggon to pick up. Then he gives me a cigarette, and then he begins to talk."

"Talk, what about?"

"Damned if I know, but the first thing I knew I was tellin' him about the broncho bustin',--that's my job, you know--and how I won out from Nigger Jake in the Calgary Stampede, until I was that stuck on myself that I said: 'Well, sir, we'd better get a move on,' and up he gets with my kit-bag on his back. By and by, we picks up another lame duck and then another, feedin' 'em with chocolate and slingin' his jaw, and when we was at the limit, he halts us outside one of them stone shacks and knocks at the door. 'No soldiers here,' snaps the red-headed angel, shuttin' the door right in his face. Then he opens the door and steps right in where she could see him, and starts to talk to her, and us listening out in the rain. Say! In fifteen minutes we was all standin'

up to a feed of coffee and buns, and then he gets Harry Hobbs whistlin'

and singin', and derned if we couldn't have marched to Berlin. Say!

He's a good one, ain't no quitter, and he won't let nobody else be a quitter."

And thus it came that with Corporal Thom and his derelicts the chaplain marched into a new place in the esteem of the men of his battalion, and of its sergeant major.

But of this, of course, Barry had no knowledge. He knew that he had made some little progress into the confidence of both officers and men in his battalion. He had made, too, some firm friendships which had relieved, to a certain extent, the sense of isolation and loneliness that had made his first months with the battalion so appalling. But there still remained the sense of failure inasfar as his specific duty as chaplain was concerned.

The experiences of the first weeks in England only served to deepen in him the conviction that his influence on the men against the evils which were their especial snare was as the wind against the incoming tide, beating in from the North Sea. He could make a ripple, a certain amount of fussy noise, but the tide of temptation rolled steadily onward, unchecked in its flow.

The old temptations to profanity, drink and lust, that had haunted the soldiers' steps at home, were found to be lying in wait for them here and in aggravated form. True, in the mess and in his presence among the men there was less profanity than there had been at the first, but it filled him with a kind of rage to feel that this change was due to no sense of the evil of the habit, but solely to an unwillingness to give offence to one whom many of them were coming to regard with respect and some even with affection.

"I hate that," he said to the M. O., to whom he would occasionally unburden his soul. "You'd think I was a kind of policeman over their morals."