Fifteen months ago I was a private quartered in a camp near Aldershot.  After tea it began to get dark.  The tent was damp, gloomy, and cold.  The Y.M.C.A. tent and the Canteen tent were crowded.  One wandered off to the town.  The various soldiers’ clubs were filled and overflowing.  The bars required more cash than one possessed.  The result was that one spent a large part of one’s evenings wandering aimlessly about the streets.  Fortunately I discovered an upper room in a Wesleyan soldiers’ home, where there was generally quiet, and an empty chair.  I shall always be grateful to that “home,” for the many hours which I whiled away there with a book and a pipe.  But most of us spent a great deal of our leisure, bored and impecunious, “on the streets”; and if a fellow ran up against “a bit of skirt,” he was generally just in the mood to follow it wherever it might lead.  The moral of this is, double your subscriptions to the Y.M.C.A., Church huts, soldiers’ clubs, or whatever organization you fancy!  You will be helping to combat vice in the only sensible way.

I don’t suppose that the officers were much better off than we were.  Their tents may have been a little lighter and less crowded than ours.  They had a late dinner to occupy part of the long evening.  They had more money to spend, and perhaps more to occupy their minds.  But I fancy that as great a proportion of them as of us took the false step; and though perhaps when they compared notes their language may have been less blunt than ours, I am not sure that, for this very reason, it may not have been more poisonous.  But mind you, we did not all go wrong, by any means, though I believe that some fellows did, both officers and men, who would not have done so if they had stayed at home with their mothers, sisters, sweethearts, or wives.

So much for the Army at home.  When we cross the Channel every feature is a hundred times intensified.  Consider the fighting man in the trenches—­and I am still speaking of both officers and men—­the most ordinary refinements of life are conspicuously absent.  There is no water to wash in.  Vermin abound, sleeping and eating accommodations are frankly disgusting.  One is obliged for the time to live like a pig.  Added to this one is all the time in a state of nervous tension.  One gets very little sleep.  Every night has its anxieties and responsibilities.  Danger or death may come at any moment.  So for a week or a fortnight or a month, as the case may be.  Then comes the return to billets, to comparative safety and comfort—­the latter nothing to boast about though!  Tension is relaxed.  There is an inevitable reaction.  Officers and men alike determine to “gather rosebuds” while they may.  Their bodies are fit, their wills are relaxed.  If they are built that way, and an opportunity offers, they will “satisfy the lusts of the flesh.”