“Say, padre; come in here.  There’s room after all.”

Peter felt cheered.  He staggered to the door, and found the others busy making room.  A subaltern of the A.S.C. gripped his small attache case and swung it up on to the rack.  The South African pulled a British warm off the vacant seat and reached out for the suit-case.  And the third man, with the rank of a Major and the badge of a bursting bomb, struck a match and paused as he lit a cigarette to jerk out: 

“Damned full train!  We ought to have missed it, Donovan.”

“It’s a good stunt that, if too many blighters don’t try it on,” observed the subaltern, reaching for Peter’s warm.  “But they did my last leave, and I got the devil of a choking off from the brass-hat in charge.  It’s the Staff train, and they only take Prime Ministers, journalists, and trade-union officials in addition.  How’s that, padre?”

“Thanks,” said Peter, subsiding.  “It’s jolly good of you to take me in.  I thought I’d got to stand from here to Folkestone.”

H.P.  Jenks, Second-Lieutenant A.S.C., regarded him seriously.  “It couldn’t be done, padre,” he said, “not at this hour of the morning.  I left Ealing about midnight more or less, got sandwiched in the Metro with a Brigadier-General and his blooming wife and daughters, and had to wait God knows how long for the R.T.O.  If I couldn’t get a seat and a break after that, I’d be a casualty, sure thing.”

“It’s your own fault for going home last night,” observed the Major judiciously. (Peter noticed that he was little older than Jenks on inspection.) “Gad, Donovan, you should have been with us at the Adelphi!  It was some do, I can tell you.  And afterwards...”

“Shut up, Major!” cut in Jenks.  “Remember the padre.”

“Oh, he’s broad-minded I know, aren’t you, padre?  By the way, did you ever meet old Drennan who was up near Poperinghe with the Canadians?  He was a sport, I can tell you.  Mind you, a real good chap at his job, but a white man.  Pluck!  By jove!  I don’t think that chap had nerves.  I saw him one day when they were dropping heavy stuff on the station, and he was getting some casualties out of a Red Cross train.  A shell burst just down the embankment, and his two orderlies ducked for it under the carriage, but old Drennan never turned a hair.  ‘Better have a fag,’ he said to the Scottie he was helping.  ’It’s no use letting Fritz put one off one’s smoke.’”

Peter said he had not met him, but could not think of anything else to say at the moment, except that he was just going out for the first time.

“You don’t say?” said Donovan dryly.

“Wish I was!” ejaculated Jenks.

“Good chap,” replied the Major.  “Pity more of your sort don’t come over.  When I was up at Loos, September last year, we didn’t see a padre in three months.  Then they put on a little chap—­forget his name—­who used to bike over when we were in rest billets.  But he wasn’t much use.”