CHAPTER I In the midst of our work at a base camp, there came a sudden call to go "up the line" to the great battle front. Leaving the railway, we took a motor and pressed on over the solidly paved roads of France, which are now pulsing arteries of traffic, crowded with trains of motor transports pouring in their steady stream of supplies for the men and munitions for the guns. Now we turn out... more...

INTRODUCTION The story I am about to tell is one of surpassing interest. It is the story of Christian life, work, and heroism among our troops at the front. The soldier is easily moved to good or to evil. In the past evil influences have been more powerful and more numerous than influences for good. Our soldiers had been drawn, for the most part, from classes outside all churches and Christian... more...

CHAPTER I Mersa Matruh and the Senussi It is a little difficult to know the precise place at which to begin this narrative. There are, as it were, several points d'appui. One might describe the outward voyage, in a troopship packed to three or four times its normal peace-time capacity; where men slept on the floors, on mess-tables, and in hammocks so closely slung that once you were in it was... more...

Ambitious Brill slid smoothly into her berth in the Brooklyn Navy Yard after far too many weeks at sea, as far as her crew were concerned. After all the necessary preliminaries had been waded through, the majority of that happy crew went ashore to enjoy a well-earned and long-anticipated leave in the depths of the brick-and-glass canyons of Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson. The trip had been uneventful, in so... more...

CHAPTER I THE MAYO FUSILIERS "What am I to do with you, Terence? It bothers me entirely; there is not a soul who will take you, and if anyone would do so, you would wear out his patience before a week's end; there is not a dog in the regiment that does not put his tail between his legs and run for his bare life if he sees you; and as for the colonel, he told me only the other day that he had... more...

WITH METHUEN'S COLUMN ON AN AMBULANCE TRAIN. The first view of Capetown from the sea is not easily forgotten. We sailed into the bay just as the sun was rising in splendour behind the cliffs of Table Mountain. The houses of the town which fill the space between the hills and the sea were still more or less in shadow, picked out here and there by twinkling lights. On the summit rested a fleecy... more...

CHAPTER IA BOUT AT SINGLESTICK "Get thee down, laddie, I tell thee." This injunction, given for the third time, and in a broad north-country dialect, came from the guard of the York and Newcastle coach, a strange new thing in England. A wonderful vehicle the York and Newcastle coach, covering the eighty-six long miles between the two towns in the space of two-and-thirty hours, and as yet an... more...

EASTWARD HO! Our Battalion of the Manchesters was typical of the old Territorial Force, whose memory has already faded in the glory of the greater Army created during the War, but whose services in the period between the retreat from Mons and the coming into action of "Kitchener's Men" claim national gratitude. Their earlier history hardly emerges from parochialism. Founded in 1859 and... more...

CHAPTER I. A VIRGINIA PLANTATION. "I won't have it, Pearson; so it's no use your talking. If I had my way you shouldn't touch any of the field hands. And when I get my way—that won't be so very long—I will take very good care you shan't. But you shan't hit Dan." "He is not one of the regular house hands," was the reply; "and I shall appeal to Mrs.... more...

Preface. The reconquest of the Soudan will ever be mentioned as one of the most difficult, and at the same time the most successful, enterprises ever undertaken. The task of carrying an army hundreds of miles across a waterless desert; conveying it up a great river, bristling with obstacles; defeating an enormously superior force, unsurpassed in the world for courage; and, finally, killing the leader... more...