The only difficulty we ever had with that committee arose from its passion for making rules. Our idea for the management of the club was to have as few rules as possible. The committee, if unchecked, would have out-Heroded the War Office itself in multiplying regulations. I am inclined to think that it is a mistake to run institutions on purely democratic lines, not because reasonable liberty would degenerate into licence, but because there would be no liberty at all. If democracy ever comes to its own, and the will of the people actually prevails, we may all find ourselves so tied up with laws regulating our conduct that we will wish ourselves back under the control of a tyrant.
It was during those hours of recreation that Miss N. reigned over the club. She ran a canteen for the boys, boiling eggs, serving tea, cocoa, malted milk, bread-and-butter, and biscuits. She played games. She started and inspired sing-songs. She listened with sympathy which was quite unaffected to long tales of wrongs suffered, of woes and of joys. She was never without a crowd of boys round her, often clinging to her, and the offers of help she received must have been embarrassing to her.
Miss N. had a little room of her own in the club. She furnished it very prettily, and we used to pretend to admire the view from the windows. Once we tried to persuade an artist who happened to be in camp to make a sketch from that window. The artist shrank from the task. The far background was well enough, trees on the side of a hill; but the objects in the middle distance were a railway line and a ditch full of muddy water. In the foreground there were two incinerators, a dump of old tins, and a Salvation Army hut. I dare say the artist was right in shrinking from the subject.
In that little room of hers, Miss N. had tea parties every day before the afternoon lecture. I was often there. Sometimes I brought M. with me. Always there were boys, as many as the room would hold, often more than it held comfortably. Pain d’épice is not my favourite food in ordinary life, but I ate it with delight in that company. No one, on this side of the grave, will ever know how much Miss N. did for those boys in a hundred ways. I feebly guess, because I know what her friendship meant to me. I was, I know, a trial to her. My lax churchmanship must have shocked her. My want of energy must have annoyed her. But she remained the most loyal of fellow-workers.
There were breakfast-parties, as well as tea-parties, in Miss N.’s room on Sunday mornings. We had a celebration of the Holy Communion at 6 o’clock and afterwards we breakfasted with Miss N. The memory of one Sunday in particular remains with me. On Easter Sunday in 1915 I celebrated on board the Lusitania, a little way outside the harbour of New York, the congregation kneeling among the arm-chairs and card-tables of the great smoke-room on the upper deck. In 1916 I read the same office in the class-room of the Y.S.C., with a rough wooden table for an altar, a cross made by the camp carpenter and two candles for furniture, and boys, confirmed ten days before, they and Miss N., for congregation. Afterwards, in her little room, we had the happiest of all our parties. Surely our Easter eggs were good to eat.
I have written of the members of the Y.S.C. as boys. They were boys, but every now and then one or another turned out to be very much a man in experience. There was one whom I came to know particularly well. He had been “up the line” and fought. He had been sent down because at the age of eighteen he could not stand the strain.
I was present in our little military church when he was baptized, and on the same afternoon confirmed by Bishop Bury. I gave him his confirmation card and advised him to send it home to his mother for safety. “I think, sir,” he said, “that I would rather send it to my wife.” He was a fellow-citizen of mine, born and bred in Belfast. We Ulstermen are a forward and progressive people.