188 THE REV. CANON JAMES O. HANNAY_, M.A., ON 



There is no chance of missing the presence of the Spirit which 

 moves from him who blesses to those who are blessed and back 

 from them to him. These things were present, not always 

 present, not always in the same force, but much oftener than not 

 they were there. Drafts were of various sizes. Sometimes three 

 hundred men were paraded. Sometimes not" more than a dozen. 

 The start of the departing drafts was made at night, almost 

 always. Officers moving among the men inspected their kits 

 by the light of lanterns. The padre, standing before the men, 

 was rarely able to see their faces. They were dark figures, silent, 

 still as statues ; no more. Sometimes, in the case of small drafts, 

 a lantern held beside me enabled me to see the men. There 

 were dull faces and apathetic, sometimes hostile faces, though not 

 many. Most of them, when I could see them, were different. They 

 w^ere the faces of men who were hungering for something — for 

 God. Once there came unexpectedly to us a whole battalion of 

 men under their own colonel. They camped in a piece of waste 

 ground beside our men. They stayed with us two days and one 

 night. The next night they marched away. They were miners 

 from the north of England. On the day of their departure their 

 colonel came to me and asked me to hold a service for them as 

 I did for our own men when they were going. He said that his 

 men wanted it. I shall always remember that night. The 

 battalion, at full strength, filled our parade ground. The night 

 was stormy and a fine snow blew across us. There was almost 

 no light. I stood at the bottom of the long slope of the parade 

 ground and had little hope that my voice would reach the farther 

 men. But I am as sure as I can be of anything that not my 

 prayer alone, but many prayers, went up to God that night. 



It is not, I think, right, to speak much about the letters which 

 the men wrote home to their wives or parents. It was my duty 

 to read, I suppose, many thousands of them. They w^ere of 

 different kinds, written by men of various degrees of education. 

 But I think there can be no breach of confidence in saying this : 

 a very large proportion of the letters contained some kind of 

 prayer, if it were no more than a " God bless you, dear wife,'' at 

 the end ; that, or an expression of confidence that God would 

 look after those left behind in England. Much rarer was a 

 request for prayer. The men who wrote were thinking very 

 little about themselves and their own danger, very much about 

 their homes and those in them, and they believed that God would 

 take care of those over whom they themselves could no longer 



