“You have earned the right to say anything you like to me,” said the
Colonel. “Go right on.”

And then my friend said, “Well, come with me, sir, to the back, and I will
get you a cup of coffee.”

“No, not a minute before the boys. I’ll take my turn with them.”

That’s the spirit. Your boys, I say, are great stuff. They have their
follies. They can go to the devil if they want to, but tens of thousands
of them don’t want to, and hundreds of thousands are living straight in
spite of their surroundings. They are the bravest, dearest boys that God
ever gave to the world, and you and I ought to be proud of them. If the
people at home were a tenth as grateful as they ought to be they would
crowd into our churches, if it were for nothing else but to pray for and
give thanks for the boys.

They are just great, your boys. They saved your homes. I was recently in a
city in France which had before the war a population of 55,000 people.
When I was there, there were not 500 people in that city—54,500 were
homeless refugees, if they weren’t killed. I walked about that city for a
month, searching for a house that wasn’t damaged, a window that wasn’t
broken, and I never found one. The whole of that city will have to be
rebuilt. A glorious cathedral, a magnificent pile of municipal buildings,
all in ruins; the Grande Place, a meeting-place for the crowned heads of
Europe, gone! “Thou hast made of a city a heap”—a heap of rubbish. _Your_
city would have been like that but for the boys in khaki.

I was saying my prayers in a corner of an old broken chateau, the Y.M.C.A.