A CAMP FOLLOWER ON THE WESTERN FRONT.* Mu. IloR uNo's

book has a double attraction. In the first

place it gives us a most interesting insight into the routine work of a Y.M.C.A. but at an advanced post on the Western Front.

Most of us, either from our own grateful experience or that of our friends, know a good deal from the custom side of those hospitable interiors, but surprisingly little is known of the life " behind the counter." But in addition to its interesting matter, the book is written with a literary excellence and an inspiration that should commend it to all lovers of good literature.

Mr. Hornung joined his ark in the mud " on the evening of a December day :-

" The place was to become familiar to me under many aspects. I have known it more than presentable in a clean suit of snow, and really picturesque with a sharp moon cocked upon some towering trees, as yet strangely intact. It was at its best, perhaps, as a nocturne pricked out by a swarm of electric torches, going and coming along the duck-boards in a grand chain of sparks and flashes. But its true colours were the wet browns and drabs of that first glimpse in the December dusk, with the Ark hull down in the mud, and the cinema a sister ship across her bows."

To the author of Raffles of course the human element was supremely interesting, and there are many little character sketches—the Guardsman laboriously making his will in his

field pocket-book ; the spectacled N.C.O. in a Red Cross unit who held a religious service of his own weekly, when " an astounding flow of spiritual invective " filled the but from end to end ; the "pretty boy" who, though tragically young, had yet outlived the romance of war and shuddered at every new start

up the line. Mr. Hornung tries hard through many pages to be Impartial in his appreciation of the different regiments, but his love of the men from Scotland peeps out over and over again, and at last he gives up the attempt, and in a chapter on The Jocks " lets himself go in a passion of admiration:— "I speak of them only as I saw them across a Y.M.C.A. counter, demanding twust ' without waste of syllables, or

wricht:ng-pads ' or caunles ' ; huge men with little voices, little men with enormous muscles ; men of whalebone with th3 quaint still gait engendered by the kilt, looking as though their upper halves wore in strait waistcoats, simply because the rest of them goes so free ; figures of droll imperturbability, of bold and handsome sang-froid, hunting in couples among the ruins for any fun or trouble that might be going. As if the town belonged to them ! ' said one who loved the sight of them ; but I always thought the distinctive thing about the Jock was his air of belonging to the town, ruined or otherwise, or to the bleak stretch of war-eaten countryside where one had the good fortune

i • Not.. of a Camp Follower. By L. W. Hornung. London: Constable. les. mita to encounter him. His matter-of-fact stolidity, his dry scorn of discomfort, the soul above hardship looking out of his keen let dreamy eyes, the tight smile on his proud, uncomplaining ips—to meet all these in a trench was to feel the trench trans- formed to some indestructible stone alley of the Old Town. These men might have been born and bred in dug-outs, and played all their lives in No-Man's-Land, as town children play about a street and revel in its dangers."

Book-lovers will take a special interest in the library formed by Mr. Hornung at the Rest Hut for the benefit of " the readers, writers, musicians, and above all the weary men, of an Army Corps " :-

" The first book that I connect with a specific inquiry was one that I had certainly failed to order. It was anything of Walter de la Mare's' ; and I felt a Philistine for having nothing, but a fool for supposing for a moment that I had pitched my but within the boundaries of Philistia. There might have been a conspiracy to undeceive me on the point without delay. The Poetry Shelf (despite deficiencies so promptly proven) received attention from the start. I forget if it was Mr. de In Mare's admirer who presently took out The Golden Treasury, of which we mercifully had several copies ; it was certainly a Jock. I showed him the Shelf, and could have wrung his hand for the tone in which he murmured Keats ! ' It was reverential, awe-stricken, and just right. Clearly his Dominic, had not abused the taws."

For the vast majority the writings of those romanticists, Baroness D'Orezy and Miss Dell, were first favourites, but there was a large minority who, like Mr. Hornung's Keats-lover, desired something rather more satisfying. There was the usual type of eager intellectual who demanded Wells and Galsworthy, but Stevenson was also a name to conjure with, Dickens and Thackeray were always " out," Trollope and Reade, and William De Morgan, had their admirers. There was the delightful Coldstream Guardsman who had a taste for classic authors " of full flavour," who " put up with Anatole France and oddments of Swift and Wilde," and who was disgusted to find that the but Gulliver was a nursery version, but who also had an appreciation of Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying ; there was the argumentative young man who read and debated The Private Papers of Henry Ryeeroft ; and

there was also " a certain stretcher-bearer, a homely old fellow with a horse-shoe moustache and mild brown eyes ; not from the high brow unit," who took out Raffles as a compliment

to the Rest Hut superintendent. " He returned it without a word to temper his forgiving smile, and took out The Golden Treasury as a restorative." The existence of this stalwart minority seems, to our surprise, to have amazed Mr. Hornung. He confesses also that beyond his invention were " a young City clerk who played the piano divinely by the hour together," and " a very shy young man, a chemist's assistant from the most unhallowed suburb, for whom I had to order Beethoven and Chopin, Liszt and Brahma and Schumann, because he could play even better, but not from memory."

Though never doubting the sincerity of the Church's ministers, Mr. Hornung is compelled to join in criticism of their methods. " Morality was too much their watchword. Sin the too frequent barden of their eloquence." Failings that were offences aaa:nst manners more than morals were constantly held up to obloquy when the offenders should rather have been led "to contemplate the love of Christ and its human reflex in their own heroic hearts." Finally, all those who regarded Y.M.C.A. work as something of a " soft job," " of tea and prayers served out in equal parts " in a safe area, should read Mr. Hornung's descrip- tions of his own experiences with a cocoa canteen in the front trenches ; of the Rest Hut under shell-fire; and the inspiring reports he gives of endurance and bravery in Y.M.C.A. huts in advanced positions up and down the Western Front.