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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 46323
   :PG.Title: The Soul of the Soldier
   :PG.Released: 2014-07-18
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Thomas Tiplady
   :DC.Title: The Soul of the Soldier
              Sketches from the Western Battle-Front
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1918
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER
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      Cover art

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      :alt: Captain Guy Drummond, 13th Royal Canadian Highlanders. Killed in action, April, 1915. "A SON OF THE MOTHERLAND"

      Captain Guy Drummond, 13th Royal Canadian Highlanders. 
      Killed in action, April, 1915. 
      "A SON OF THE MOTHERLAND"

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      The Soul *of* The Soldier

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      *Sketches from the Western
      Battle-Front*

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      BY

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      THOMAS TIPLADY

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      *Chaplain to the Forces*

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      Author of "THE CROSS AT THE FRONT," etc.

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      NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
      Fleming H. Revell Company
      LONDON AND EDINBURGH  

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      Copyright, 1918, by
      FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

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      New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
      Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
      London: 21 Paternoster Square
      Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street

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      TO THE MEMORY OF THE MANY "WHITE MEN"

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   I have known and loved in the London Territorials, who,
   being dedicate to their Country and the cause of Liberty, went
   over the parapet and did not return.

   |  "These laid the world away; poured out the red
   |  Sweet wine of youth: gave up the years to be
   |  Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene
   |  That men call age; and those who would have been
   |  Their sons they gave--their immortality."

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   THE MOTHER'S ANSWER

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..

   |  God gave my son in trust to me.
   |  Christ died for him.  He should be
   |  A man for Christ.  He is his own
   |  And God's and man's, not mine alone.
   |  He was not mine to give.  He gave
   |  Himself, that he might help to save
   |  All that a Christian should revere
   |  All that enlightened men hold dear.

   |  "To feed the guns."  Ah! torpid soul,
   |  Awake, and see life as a whole.
   |  When freedom, honor, justice, right,
   |  Were threatened by the despot's might,
   |  He bravely went for God, to fight
   |  Against base savages, whose pride
   |  The laws of God and man defied;
   |  Who slew the mother and the child;
   |  Who maidens, pure and sweet, defiled;
   |  He did not go to feed the guns,
   |  He went to save from ruthless Huns
   |  His home and country, and to be
   |  A guardian of democracy.

   |  "What if he does not come?" you say;
   |  Well, then, my sky will be more gray,
   |  But through the clouds the sun will shine
   |  And vital memories be mine.
   |  God's test of manhood is, I know
   |  Not, will he come--*but did he go*?

   |  JAMES L. HUGHES.

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   PREFACE

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The sketches in this book and in my
previous one, "The Cross at the
Front," are attempts to show the soul
of the soldier serving in France as I have
seen it during the year and a half that I have
been with him.  It is a padre's privilege and
duty to be the voice with which, in public
worship, the soldiers speak to God; and
through which their last thoughts are borne to
their friends at home.  He is their voice both
when they are sick or wounded, and when they
lie silent in the grave.  He speaks of their
hopes and fears, hardships and heroisms,
laughter and tears.  As best he may he tries
to tell, to those who have a right and a
longing to know, how they thought, and how they
bore themselves in the great day of trial when
all risked their lives and many laid them down.

Soldiers, as a rule, are either inarticulate or
do not care to speak of themselves; and the
padre has to be their spokesman if ever their
deeper thoughts and finer actions are to be
known to their friends.  To do this he may
have to bring himself into the picture, or even
illustrate a common thing in their lives by a
personal experience of his own.  To reveal life
and thought at the Front in the third person,
and without sacrificing truth and vividness,
requires a degree of literary power and art which
cannot be expected of a padre to whom writing
is but a by-product, and not his main work.

I have written but little of military
operations--these things are not in my province.
Moreover, they are not the things which are
most revealing.  The presence of Spring is first
and most surely revealed by the flowers in our
gardens and lanes; and the soldier is most
clearly seen in the little things that happen on
the march--in his billet or in the Dressing
Station.  Some things are not seen at all.  They
are only felt, and my opinion about them must
be taken for what it is worth.  One knows
what the men are by their influence on one's
own mind and life.  I do not judge the
morality and spirituality of our soldiers
entirely by their habits and speech, for these are
but outward and clumsy expressions of the
inner life and are largely conventional.  There
is something else to put in the reckoning, and
to find out what the soldiers are worth to us
we must somehow get behind their words and
actions and find out what they are worth to
God, whose terrible wheel of war is shaping
their characters.

I appraise them mostly by the total effect
of the impact of their souls on mine.  I know
their thoughts and feelings by the thoughts
and feelings they inspire in me.  "Do men
gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?"  There
are certain thoughts and emotions that
only come to me strongly when I am with the
soldiers or when I am living again with them
in memory, and so, I take these as their gift
to me and judge the men by their influence
on my character.  Character is, in its
influence, subtle as Spring.  Words and actions
by themselves are too coarse and conventional
to do anything but mislead us in judging the
quality of our men.  "By their fruits ye shall
know them."  Not by their leaves.  Fruit is
*seed*.  In the seed the tree reproduces itself.
And reproduction, whether in physical, moral
or spiritual life, is the test of vitality.

I have not unduly loaded my pages with
ghastly details of war, because their effect on the
mind of the reader who has not been at the
Front would be false and distorting.  The
reader would be more horrified in imagining
them than our soldiers are in seeing them.  I
have tried rather to show life at the Front,
with its mingling of red and gold, horror and
happiness, as it affects the soldier; so that his
friends at home may see it as he sees it, and
with his sense of proportion.  If I could only
do it, as well as I intend it, my pictures would
create a truer sympathy between the home and
the trench.  Some would find comfort for their
hearts, and others would awake to a new and
noble seriousness.  Soldiers have suffered
much through imperfect sympathies.  They
have been pitied for the wrong things, and
left to freeze when they needed warmth.
Only when we realize their dignity and
greatness and the true nature of their experiences
can we be their comrades and helpers.  Life
at the Front is brutal and terrifying, and yet
our soldiers are neither brutalized nor
terrorized, for there is something great and noble
at the Front which keeps life pure and sweet
and the men gentle and chivalrous.  When
"the boys" come home their friends will, in
almost every case, find them just as bright,
affectionate and good as when they went out.
The only change will be a subtle one--a
deepening in character and manly quality, a
broadening in mind and creed, and an impatience
with cant and make-believe whether in politics
or business, Christianity or Rationalism.
There will be an air of indefinable greatness
about them as of men who have been at grips
with the realities of life and death.

In a footnote to one of his songs, Edward
Teschemacher says that the gypsies, as they
wander through the country, leave a sprinkling
of grass or wild flowers at the cross-roads to
indicate, to those who come after them, the
road they have taken.  These flowers are
known as the "Patterain."

These essays are my Patterain--wild flowers
plucked in France, and left to mark the red
path trod during the months I have been with
my comrades at the Front.

I would the flowers were worthier, but such
as I have, I give; and they are taken out of
my heart.

   |  "Where my caravan has rested
   |    Flowers I leave you on the grass;
   |  All the flowers of love and memory;
   |    You will find them when you pass."
   |
   |  THOMAS TIPLADY.

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BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE, FRANCE.

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   CONTENTS

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CHAP.

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I.  `The Swan at Ypres`_
II.  `The Roadmakers`_
III.  `The Glamour of the Front`_
IV.  `A White Handkerchief`_
V.  `The Songs Our Soldiers Sing`_
VI.  `Easter Sunday`_
VII.  `"Now the Day is Over"`_
VIII.  `Sons of the Motherland`_
IX.  `The Terror by Night`_
X.  `"Eton Boys Never Duck!"`_
XI.  `"Missing"`_
XII.  `"It Must be Sunday"`_
XIII.  `Our Tommies Never Fail Us`_
XIV.  `The Cross at Neuve Chapelle`_
XV.  `The Children of Our Dead`_
XVI.  `A Funeral under Fire`_
XVII.  `A Soldier's Calvary`_
XVIII.  `The Hospital Train`_
XIX.  `After Winter, Spring`_





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.. _`THE SWAN AT YPRES`:

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   I


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   THE SWAN AT YPRES

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For three years the storm center of the
British battle front has been at Ypres.
Every day and night it has been the
standing target of thousands of guns.  Yet,
amid all the havoc and thunder of the artillery,
the graceful white form of a swan had been
seen gliding over the water of the moat.  It
never lacked food, and was always welcome
to a share of Tommy's rations.  In the Battle
of Messines--I had the story first-hand from
a lieutenant of artillery whose battery was
hidden close by, and who was an eye-witness
of the incident--a shell burst near the swan,
and it was mortally wounded.  For three long
years it had spread its white wings as gallantly
as the white sails of Drake's flagship when he
sailed out of Plymouth Sound to pluck the beard
of the Spaniard.  But now its adventurous
voyaging was over.  Another beautiful and
innocent thing had been destroyed by the war
and had passed beyond recall.  There was no
dying swan-song heard on the waters, but all
who saw its passing felt that the war had taken
on a deeper shade of tragedy.

Many a "white man" had been slain near
the spot but somehow the swan seemed a
mystical being, and invulnerable.  It was a relic
of the days of peace, and a sign of the survival
of purity and grace amid the horrors and
cruelties of war.  It spoke of the sacred things
that yet remain--the beautiful things of the
soul upon which war can lay no defiling finger.
Now it had gone from the water and Ypres
seems more charred than ever, and the war
more terrible.  The death of the swan revealed
against its white wings the peculiar inhumanity
of the present war.  It is a war in which the
enemy spares nothing and no one.  He is more
blind and merciless than the Angel of Death
which swept over Egypt, for the angel had
regard to the blood which the Israelites had
sprinkled over the lintels of their doors and
he passed by in mercy.  To the German Eagle
every living creature is legitimate prey.  No
blood upon the lintel can save the inmate; not
even the cross of blood on the hospital tent or
ship.  Wounded or whole, combatant or
non-combatant, its beak and talons tear the tender
flesh of all and its lust is not sated.

In Belgium and Serbia it is believed that
more women and children perished than men.
Things too hideous for words were done
publicly in the market-squares.  Neither age nor
sex escaped fire and sword.  The innocent babe
was left to suck the breast of its dead mother
or was dandled on the point of the bayonet.
What resistance can the Belgian swan make
to the German eagle?  It needs must lie torn
and bleeding beneath its talons.  The German
Emperor has waded deeper in blood than
Macbeth, and has slain the innocent in their
sleep.  Even the sea is full of the women,
children, and non-combatant men he has
drowned.  His crown is cemented together with
innocent blood and its jewels are the eyes of
murdered men and women.  The wretched
man has made rivers of blood to flow yet not
a drop in them is from his own veins or the
veins of his many sons.  Napoleon risked his
life with his men in every battle but this man
never once.  While sending millions to their
death he yet consents to live, and protects his
life with the anxious care a miser bestows on
his gold.  Alone among large families in
Germany his household is without a casualty.
Though a nation be white and innocent as the
Belgian swan it will not escape his sword, and
he will swoop upon it the more readily because
it is unarmed.  The swan cannot live where
the eagle flies, and one or the other must die.

But the stricken swan of Ypres is not merely
the symbol of Belgium and her fate.  There
are other innocents who have perished or been
sorely wounded.  The whole creation is groaning
and travailing in pain.  The neutral nations
are suffering with the belligerent, and the lower
creatures are suffering with mankind.

Next to seeing wounded men on the roads at
the front, I think the saddest sight is that of
dying horses and mules.  Last winter they had
to stand, with little cover, exposed to the bitter
blasts.  It was impossible to keep them clean
or dry, for the roads were churned into liquid
mud and both mules and drivers were plastered
with it from head to foot.  To make things
worse there was a shortage of fodder; and
horses waste away rapidly under ill-feeding.
Before the fine weather had given them a
chance to recover weight and strength, the
Battle of Arras began, and every living beast
of burden, as well as every motor-engine, was
strained to its utmost.  The mule is magnificent
for war, and our battles have been won as
much by mules as men.  Haig could rely on
one as much as on the other.  The mule will
eat anything, endure anything, and, when
understood and humored by its driver, will do
anything.  It works until it falls dead by the
roadside.  In the spring, hundreds died in
harness.  In fact, few die except in harness.  They
die facing the foe, dragging rations along
shell-swept roads to the men in the trenches.

On two miles of road I have counted a dozen
dead mules; and burial parties are sent out to
put them out of sight.  One night, alone, I got
three dying mules shot.  The road was crowded
with traffic, yet it was difficult to find either
an officer with a revolver or a transport-driver
with a rifle.  I had to approach scores before
I could find a man who had the means to put
a mule out of its misery; and we were within
two miles of our Front.  So rigid is our line of
defense that those behind it do not trouble to
take arms.  Even when I found a rifleman he
hesitated to shoot a mule.  There is a rule that
no horse or mule must be shot without proper
authority, and when you consider the enormous
cost of one the necessity for the rule is obvious.
I had therefore to assure a rifleman that I
would take full responsibility for his action.
He then loaded up, put the nozzle against the
mule's forehead and pulled the trigger.  A
tremor passed through the poor thing's body
and its troubles were over.  It had come all
the way from South America to wear itself out
carrying food to fighting men, and it died by
the road when its last ounce of strength was spent.

The mule knows neither love nor offspring.
Apart from a few gambols in the field, or
while tethered to the horse-lines, it knows
nothing but work.  It is the supreme type of
the drudge.  It is one of the greatest factors
in the war, and yet it receives scarcely any
recognition and more of whipping than of
praise.  Only too often I have seen their poor
shell-mangled bodies lying by the roadside
waiting till the battle allowed time for their
burial.  Yet what could be more innocent of
any responsibility for the war?  They are as
innocent as the swan on the moat at Ypres.

Yet the greatest suffering among innocents is
not found at the Front at all.  It is found at
home.  At the Front there is suffering of body
and mind, but at home there is the suffering
of the heart.  Every soldier knows that his
mother and wife suffer more than he does, and
he pities them from his soul.  War is a cross
on which Woman is crucified.  The soldier dies
of his wounds in the morning of life, but his
wife lingers on in pain through the long garish
day until the evening shadows fall.  There is
no laughter at home such as you hear at the
Front, or even in the hospitals.  One finds a
gayety among the regiments in France such as
is unknown among the people left at home.  It
is the sunshine of the street as compared with
the light in a shaded room.  There is a youth
and buoyancy at the Front that one misses
sadly in the homeland.

To a true woman with a son or husband at
the Front, life becomes a nightmare.  To her
distorted imagination the most important man
in the country is not the Prime Minister but
the postman.  She cannot get on with her
breakfast for listening for his footsteps.  There
is no need for him to knock at the door, she
has heard him open the gate and walk up the
gravel path.  Her heart is tossed like a bubble
on the winds of hope and fear.  She finds
herself behind the door without knowing how she
got there, and her hand trembles as she picks
up the letter to see if the address is in "his"
handwriting or an official's.  The words, "On
His Majesty's Service," she dreads like a
witch's incantation.  They may be innocent
enough, and cover nothing more than belated
Commission Papers, but she trembles lest they
should be but the fair face of a dark-hearted
messenger, who is to blot out the light of her
life forever.  If she goes out shopping and sees
a telegraph-boy go in the direction of her home
she forgets her purchases and hurries back to
see if he is going to knock at her door.  The
rosy-faced messenger has become a sinister
figure, an imp from the nether world.  He may
be bringing news of her loved one's arrival "on
leave," but so many evil faces of fear and
doubt peer through the windows of her heart
that she cannot believe in the innocence and
good-will of the whistling boy.  Her whole
world is wrapped up in his little orange-colored
envelope.

The boys at the Front know of the anxiety
and suspense that darken their homes, and they
do all they can to lighten them.  There were
times on the Somme when the men were utterly
exhausted with fighting and long vigils in the
trenches.  Water was scarce, and a mild
dysentery came into evidence.  No fire could be
lighted to cook food or make hot tea.  The
ranks had been thinned, and only two officers
were left to each company.  The weather was
bad and the captured trench uncomfortable.
Any moment word might come for another
attack.  The campaign was near its close, and
the work must be completed despite the
prevalent exhaustion.  The officers were too tired,
depressed and preoccupied to censor hundreds
of letters.  In front of him each could see a
gaping grave.  The sun was rapidly "going west"
and leaving them to the cold and dark.
Nothing seemed to matter in comparison with *that*.
To hold services were impossible and I felt
that the best I could do was to walk through
the trench, chat with the officers and men,
gather up the men's letters and take them back
and censor in my tent.  This gave the officers
times to write their own, and an opportunity
to post them.

But note, I pray you, the nobility of these
gallant fellows.  All of them were exhausted
and depressed.  The shadows of death were
thick about them, yet when I opened their
letters, I found myself--with two exceptions out
of three or four hundred--in an entirely
different atmosphere.  It was a sunny atmosphere
in which birds were singing.  The men said
nothing of their suffering, their depression,
their fears for the future.  The black wings of
death cast no shadow over their pages.  They
said they were "all right," "merry and bright"
and "soon going back for a long rest."  They
told their mothers what kind of cigarettes to
send, and gave them details how to make up
the next parcel.  They talked as if death were
out of sight--a sinister fellow with whom they
had nothing to do.

The officers, of course, censor their own
letters, so I did not see how they wrote.  But
I know.  They wrote as the men wrote, and
probably with a still lighter touch.  Their
homes were dark enough with anxiety, yet not
by any word of theirs would the shadows be
deepened.  They could not shield themselves
from war's horrors but they would do their
best to shield their white swans at home.  They
could not keep their women folk out of the
war, but they would deliver them from its
worst horrors.  Not till they had fallen would
they let the shafts pass them to their mothers
and wives; rather would they gather them in
their own breasts.  In the hour of the world's
supreme tragedy there was a woman standing
by the cross, and the august Sufferer, with
dying breath, bade His closest friend take her,
when the last beam faded, to his own home
and be in His place, a son to her.  I know
no scene that better represents the feelings of
our soldiers towards their loved ones at home.

Their women gave them inspiration and joy
in the days of peace, and they still float before
their vision amid the blackened ruins of war,
as beautiful and stainless in their purity as the
white swan on the moat of Ypres.





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.. _`THE ROADMAKERS`:

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   II


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   THE ROADMAKERS

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We had just marched from one part of
the Front to another and by a
round-about way.  Each morning the
Quartermaster and "the billeting party" went
on before, and each evening we slept in a
village that was strange to us.  Each of the men
carried on his back a pack and equipment
weighing about eighty or ninety pounds.
Through sleet and blizzard and, for the
most part, through open, exposed country,
we continued our march without a day of
rest.  By the fifth evening we reached the
village where we were to have three or four
weeks of rest and training before entering the
trenches for the spring offensive.  We had
unpacked and were sitting at dinner when a
telegram came announcing that all previous
plans were canceled, and that at dawn we must
take to the road again.  Something unexpected
had happened, good or ill, we knew not which,
and we had to enter the line in front of Arras.
For three days more we marched.  Daily the
sound of the guns came nearer, and the men
were tired and footsore.  They were also
deeply disappointed of the long rest to which
they had been looking forward after a winter
in the trenches at Neuve Chapelle.  Yet they
marched cheerily enough.  "It's the War!"
they said one to another and, true to their own
philosophy, "packed up their troubles in their
old kit bags and smiled."  When any man
faltered a bit, as if about to fall out by the
way, the others cheered him on by singing
"Old Soldiers never die" to the tune of the
old Sunday school hymn, "Kind words can
never die."  Sometimes an officer would
shoulder a man's rifle to the end of the march,
or until he felt better.  In eight unbroken days
of marching we covered ninety-eight miles and
finally arrived at a camp of huts within a day's
march of the trenches we are to occupy.  Here,
where our huts stand like islands in a sea of
mud, we are, unless suddenly needed, to take
a few days' rest.

On the ninety-eight miles of road over which
we tramped, we passed company after
company of British roadmakers.  In some parts
they were widening the road, in other parts
repairing it.  The roads of Northeastern
France are handed over to our care as
completely as if they were in England.  Our
road-makers are everywhere, and as we pass they
stand, pick or shovel in hand, to salute the
colonel and shout some humorous remark to
the laughing riflemen--only to get back as much
as they give.

This morning I visited the neighboring
village to arrange for a Sunday service.  The
roads are hopeless for bicycles at this time of
the year, so I fell back on Adam's method of
getting about.  The road to the village was
torn and broken, and "thaw precautions" were
being observed.  Everywhere it was ankle-deep
in mud and, in the holes, knee-deep.  Innumerable
motor-wagons had crushed it beneath their
ponderous weight, and my feet had need of
my eyes to guide them.  In skirting the holes
and rough places, I added quite a mile to the
journey.

It was annoying to get along so slowly, and
I called the road "rotten" and blamed the War
for its destructive work.  Then I saw that I
had been unjust in judgment.  The War had
constructed more than it had destroyed.  The
road had been a little muddy country lane, but
the soldiers had made it wide as Fleet Street,
and it was bearing a mightier traffic than that
famous thoroughfare night and day.  The
little road with its mean perfections and
imperfections had gone, and the large road with
big faults and big virtues had come.  This
soldiers' road has faults the farmers' road
knew not, but then it has burdens and duties
unknown before, and it has had no time to
prepare for them.  Like our boy-officers who
are bearing grown men's burdens of responsibility
and bearing them well, the road has had
no time to harden.  To strengthen itself for
its duties, it eats up stones as a giant eats up
food.  I had no right to look for the smoothness
of Oxford Street or the Strand.  Such
avenues represent the work of centuries, this
of days.  They have grown with their burdens,
but this has had vast burdens thrown upon it
suddenly, and while it was immature.  Oxford
Street and Fleet Street are the roads of peace,
and laden with wealth and luxury, law and
literature--things that can wait.  But on this
road of the soldiers' making, nothing is
allowed except it be concerned with matters of
life and death.  It is the road of war, and
there is a terrible urgency about it.  Over it
pass ammunition to the guns, rations to the
soldiers in the trenches, ambulances bearing
back the wounded to the hospital.  Whatever
its conditions the work must be done, and there
is no room for a halting prudence or the pride
of appearance.  Rough though it is and muddy,
over it is passing, for all who have eyes to
see, a new and better civilization and a wider
liberty.  I had grumbled at the worn-out road
when I ought to have praised it.  I was as an
ingrate who finds fault with his father's hands
because they are rough and horny.

It was a group of soldier-roadmakers who
brought me to my senses.  They were making
a new road through the fields, and it branched
off from the one I was on.  I saw its crude
beginning and considered the burdens it would
soon have to bear.  As I stood watching these
English roadmakers my mind wandered down
the avenues of time, and I saw the Roman
soldiers building their immortal roads through
England.  They were joining town to town and
country to country.  They were introducing
the people of the North to those of the South,
and bringing the East into fellowship with the
West.  I saw come along their roads the
union of all England followed at, some
distance, by that of England, Scotland and Wales;
and I regretted that there was no foundation
on which they could build a road to Ireland.
I saw on those soldier-built roads, also,
Christianity and Civilization marching, and in the
villages and towns by the wayside they found
a home whence they have sent out missionaries
and teachers to the ends of the earth.

"The captains and the kings depart."  The
Roman Empire is no more, but the Roman
roads remain.  They direct our modern life
and business with an inevitability the Roman
soldiers never exercised.  In two thousand
years the Empire may have fallen apart and
become a thing of the past; but the roads her
sons have built in France, these two-and-a-half
years, will abide forever and be a perpetual
blessing; for, of things made by hands, there
is, after the church and the home, nothing more
sacred than the road.  The roadmaker does
more for the brotherhood of man and the
federation of the world than the most eloquent
orator.  The roadmaker has his dreams and
visions as well as the poet, and he expresses
them in broken stones.  He uses stones as
artists use colors, and orators words.  He
touches them--transient as they are--with
immortality.  A little of his soul sticks to each
stone he uses, and though the stone perishes
the road remains.  His body may perish more
quickly than the stones and be laid in some
quiet churchyard by the wayside, but his soul
will never utterly forsake the road he helped
to make.  In man's nature, and in all his works,
there is a strange blending of the temporal
and the eternal, and in nothing is it more
marked than in the roads he builds.

The roadmaker is the pioneer among men
and without him there would be neither artist
nor orator.  He goes before civilization as
John the Baptist went before Christ, and he
is as rough and elemental.  Hard as his own
stones, without him mankind would have
remained savage and suspicious as beasts of prey;
and art, science and literature would have had
no beginning.  His road may begin in war, but
it ends in peace.

The pioneers I saw roadmaking were, for the
greater part, over military age, and such as
I had often seen leaning heavily on the bar
of some miserable beer-house.  In those days
they seemed of the earth, earthy, and the stars
that lure to high thoughts and noble
endeavors seemed to shine on them in vain.  But
one never knows what is passing in the heart
of another.  Of all things human nature is
the most mysterious and deceptive.  God seems
to play at hide-and-seek with men.  He hides
pearls in oysters lying in the ooze of the sea;
and gold under the everlasting snows of the
Arctic regions.  Diamonds he buries deep down
in the dirt beneath the African veldt.  He
places Christ in a carpenter's shop, Joan of
Arc in a peasant's dwelling, Lincoln in a
settler's cabin, and Burns in a crude cottage
built by his father's own hands.  He hides
generous impulses and heroic traits in types of
men that in our mean imaginations we can only
associate with the saw-dust sprinkled bar-room.
Only when war or pestilence have kindled their
fierce and lurid flames do we find the hidden
nobility that God has stored away in strange
places--places often as foul and unlikely as
those where a miser stores his gold.

When Diogenes went about with a candle
in search of an honest man did he think to
look in the taverns and slums?  I fancy not.
Not Diogenes' candle but the "Light of the
World" was needed to reveal the treasure God
has hidden in men.  Christ alone knew where
His Father had hidden His wealth and could
guide us to it.  In this time of peril when
every man with any nobility in him is needed
to stand in the deadly breach, and with body
and soul hold back the brutality and tyranny
that would enslave the world we have, like the
woman in the parable, lit a candle and searched
every corner of our kingdom diligently.  In
the dust of unswept corners we have found
many a coin of value that, but for our
exceeding need, would have remained hidden.
To me, the wealth and wonder of the war have
been found in its sweepings.  Time and again
we have found those who were lost, and a new
happiness has come into life.  To the end of
my days I shall walk the earth with reverent
feet.  I did not know men were so great.  I
have looked at life without seeing the gold
through the dust, and have been no better than
a Kaffir child playing marbles with diamonds,
unaware of their value.  I have gone among
my fellows with proud step where I ought to
have walked humbly, and have rushed in where
angels feared to tread.

Life at the Front has made me feel mean
among mankind.  My comrades have been so
great.  In days long past, I have trodden on
the hem of Christ's garment without knowing
it.  I have not seen its jewels because I, and
others, have so often trodden it in the mire.
Yet, through the mire of slum and tavern, the
jewels have emerged pearl-white and ruby-red.
And I feel that I owe to a large part of
mankind an apology for having been before the
war so blind, callous and superficial.  But for
the agony and bloody sweat in which I have
seen my fellows, I should never have known
them for what they are, and the darkness of
death would have covered me before I had
realized what made the death of Christ
and the sufferings of all the martyrs well
worth while.  Now there is a new light upon
my path and I shall see the features of
an angel through the dirt on a slum-child's
face.  Words of Christ that once lay in the
shadow now stand out clearly, for whenever
we get below the surface of life we come to
*Him*.  He is there before us, and awaiting our
coming.

I also understand, now, something of the
meaning of the words which the Unemployed
scrawled upon their banner before the
war--"Damn your charity.  Give us work."  It was
a deep and true saying, and taught them by a
stern teacher.  When the war came we *did*
"damn our charity" and gave them "work."  Many
a man got his first chance of doing "a
man's job," and rose to the full height of his
manhood.  Many hitherto idle and drunken,
were touched in their finer parts.  They saw
their country's need, and though their country
had done little to merit their gratitude, they
responded to her call before some of the more
prudent and sober.  Those who were young
went out to fight, and every officer can tell
stories about their behavior in the hours of
danger and suffering which bring tears to the
eyes and penitence to the heart.  Those above
military age went out to make roads over which
their younger brothers and sons could march,
and get food, ammunition, or an ambulance
according to their needs.  Among the group
of middle-aged roadmakers that I saw there
were, I doubt not, some who had been counted
wastrels and who had made but a poor show
of life.  Now they had got work that made
them feel that they were men and not
mendicants, and they were "making good."

While I watched them a lark rose from a
neighboring field and sang over them a song
of the coming spring.  It was the first lark I
had heard this year, and I was glad it mingled
its notes with the sounds of the roadmakers'
shovels.  Nature is not so indifferent to human
struggles as it sometimes seems.  The man
who stands steadfastly by the right and true
and bids tyranny and wrong give place will
find, at last, that he is in league with the stones
of the field and the birds of the air, and that
the stars in their courses fight for him.  The
roadmaker and the lark are born friends.
Both are heralds of coming gladness, and while
one works, the other sings.  True work and
pure song are never far apart.  They are both
born of hope and seek to body forth the
immortal.  A man works while he has faith.
Would he sow if he did not believe the promise,
made under the rainbow, that seed-time and
harvest shall never fail?  Or could he sing
with despair choking his heart?  Yet he can
sing with death choking it.  In the very act
of dying Wesley sang the hymn, "I'll praise my
Maker while I've breath."  He sang because
of the hope of immortality.  He was not
turning his face to the blank wall of death and
oblivion but to the opening gate of a fuller
life.  He was soaring sunwards like the lark,
and soaring sang,

   |  "And when my voice is lost in death
   |  Praise shall employ my nobler powers;
   |  My days of praise shall ne'er be past."
   |

Joy can sing and Sorrow can sing, but
Despair is dumb.  It has not even a cry, for a
cry is a call for help as every mother knows,
and Despair knows no helper.  Even the saddest
song has hope in it, as the dreariest desert
has a well.  The loved one is dead but Love
lives on and whispers of a trysting place beyond
this bourne of time, where loved and lover
meet again.  The patriot's life may be pouring
from a dozen wounds on the muddy field of
battle, but his fast-emptying heart is singing
with each heavy beat, "Who dies, if my country
live?"

Roadmakers have prepared the way for
missionaries in every land.  Trail-blazers are
not always religious men--often they are wild,
reckless fellows whom few would allow a place
in the Kingdom of God--but is not their work
religious in its final upshot?  Do they not,
however unconsciously, "prepare the way of
the Lord, make straight in the desert a
highway for our God?"  Close on their heels go
the missionaries, urged on faster by the pure
love of souls than the trader by love of lucre.
The greatest among the roadmakers was a
missionary himself--David Livingstone.  And
for such an one the name Living-stone is
perfect.  It has the touch of destiny.  Through
swamp and forest he went where white feet
had never trod, and blazed a trail for the
messengers of Christ, until, worn out with fever
and hardship, he fell asleep at his prayers, to
wake no more to toil and suffering.

But while the roadmaker bestows benefits on
us he also lays obligations, for there can be
no enlargement of privilege without a
corresponding increase of responsibility.  The roads
the men are making here in France will be good
for trade.  They will open up the country as
did the military roads of Caesar and Napoleon;
and along them soldiers are marching who, at
tremendous cost to themselves, are buying for
posterity great benefits, and laying upon
posterity great obligations.  Posterity must hold and
enlarge the liberties won for them, and prove
worthy of their citizenship by resisting tyranny
"even unto blood."  We are here because our
fathers were heroes and lovers of liberty.  Had
they been cowards and slaves there would have
been no war for us.  As we follow our fathers
our sons must be ready to follow us.  The
present springs out of the past, and the future
will spring out of the present.  Inheritance
implies defense on the part of the inheritors.

The very names they give to their roads
show that our soldiers have grasped this fact.
The cold canvas hut in which I am writing is
officially described as No. 1 Hut, *Oxford
Street*.  A little farther off, and running parallel
with it, is *Cambridge* Road.  There is also an
*Eton* Road, *Harrow* Road, and *Marlborough*
Road.  Students of the universities and schools
after which these roads are named are out
here to defend what these institutions have
stood for through the hoary centuries.  They
are out to preserve the true conception of
Liberty and Fair-play, and to build roads along
which all peoples who desire it can travel
unmolested by attacks from either tyrants or
anarchists.

Right from the beginning of the war, the
idea of a Road has taken hold of the imagination
of our soldiers.  The first divisions came
out singing, "It's a long, long way to
Tipperary, but my heart's right there."  Nowadays
the popular song is "There's a long, long
trail awinding into the Land of my dreams."

They are making a Road of Liberty along
which all nations may pass to universal peace
and brotherhood, and where the weak will be
as safe from oppression as the strong.  "It's
a long, long way to go," but they have seen
their goal on the horizon, and will either reach
it or die on the way to it.  They have made
up their minds that never again shall the
shadow of the Kaiser's mailed fist, or that any
other tyrant fall across their path.  These men
never sing of war.  They hate war.  It is a
brutal necessity forced on them by the
ambition of a tyrant.  Their songs are all of peace
and none of war.  Of the future and not the
present they sing:

   |  "Tiddley-iddley-ighty,
   |  Hurry me home to Blighty;
   |  Blighty is the place for me."
   |

Whether they sing with levity or seriousness
(and levity of manner often veils their
seriousness of feeling), it is of a future of peace and
goodwill they sing.  To them the war is a
hard road leading to a better life for
mankind.  It is to them what the desert was to
the Israelites, when they left the bondage of
Egypt for the liberty of the Land of Promise.
Therefore they must tread it without faltering
even as Christ trod the way of the Cross.
"There's a long, long trail awinding into the
Land of their dreams" and they will not lose
faith in their dreams however wearisome the
way.  Elderly navvies and laborers have come
to smooth the roads for them, and nurses are
tending those who have fallen broken by the
way; while across the sundering sea are
mothers and wives whose prayers make flowers
spring up at their feet and blossoms break out
on every tree that fringes the side of the road.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE GLAMOUR OF THE FRONT`:

.. class:: center large bold

   III


.. class:: center large bold

   THE GLAMOUR OF THE FRONT

.. vspace:: 2

There is an undoubted glamour about
the Front, which when at home, in
England, cannot be explained.  In the army
or out of it, the wine of life is white and still,
but at the Front it runs red and sparkling.
One day I got a lift in a motor-wagon and
sat on a box by the side of one of the servants
of the officer's mess at the Aerodrome near
by.  He was going into Doullens, a market
town, to buy food and some little luxuries.
Captain Ball, V.C., the prince of English
flyers, was, up to the time of his death in the
air, a member of the mess, and the servant
was telling me how comfortable all the officers
make their quarters.  In a phrase he defined
the glamour of the Front.

"One day," he said, "when we were helping
him to make his room comfortable, Captain
Ball burst out into a merry laugh and chuckled,
'We haven't long to live, but we live well while
we do live.'"

There you have it.  Life is concentrated.
Death is near--just round the corner--so the
men make the most of their time and "live
well."  It has the same quality as "leave" at
home.  Leave is short and uncertain, so we
"live well."  Our friends know it may be the
last sight of us, and we know it may be our
last sight of them.  They are kind and
generous to us, as we are to them; and so, the
ten days of "leave" are just glorious.  Ruskin
says that the full splendor of the sunset lasts
but a second, and that Turner went out early
in the evening and watched with rapt attention
for that one second of supreme splendor and
delight.  He lived for sunsets and while others
were balancing their accounts, or taking tea, he
went out to see the daily miracle.  The one
second in which he saw God pass by in the glory
of the sunset was to him worth all the
twenty-four hours.  For one second in each day he
caught the glamour of earth and heaven, and
went back to his untidy studios blind to all but
the splendor he had seen.

That second each day was life, indeed, and
the glamour of the Front is like unto it.  It is
the place where life sets, and the darkness of
death draws on.  The commonest soldier feels
it and with true instinct, not less true because
unconscious, he describes death at the Front
as "going West."  It is the presence of death
that gives the Front its glamour, and life its
concentrated joy and fascination.  Captain
Ball saw it with the intuition of genius when
he said: "We haven't long to live, but we live
well while we *do* live."

The immediate presence of death at the
Front gives tone to every expression of life, and
makes it the kindest place in the world.  No
one feels he can do too much for you, and
there is nothing you would not do for another.
Whether you are an officer or a private, you
can get a lift on any road, in any vehicle, that
has an inch of room in it.  How often have
I seen a dozen tired Tommies clambering up
the back of an empty motor-lorry which has
stopped, or slowed down, to let them get in.
It is one of the merriest sights of the war and
redounds to the credit of human nature.
Cigarettes are passed round by those who have, to
those who have not, with a generosity that
reminds one of nothing so much as that of the
early Christians who "had all things common;
and sold their possessions and goods, and
parted them to all men, as every man had
need."  You need never go hungry while others
have food.  Officers are welcome at every mess
they go near, and privates will get food in the
servants' kitchen or may go shares with the
men in any billet.  It may be a man's own
fault that he took no food on the march, and
his comrades may tell him so in plain strong
language, but they will compel him to share
what they have just the same.

One wet night on the Somme I got lost in
"Happy Valley" and could not find my regiment.
Seeing a light in a tent, I made for it.
It was a pioneers' tent, but they invited me to
come in out of the storm and stay the night.
They were at supper and had only a small
supply of bully-beef, biscuits and strong tea;
but they insisted on me sharing what they had.
I was dripping with rain, and they gave me one
of their blankets.  One of them gave me a
box to sleep on, while he shared his chum's.
Some lost privates came in later wet to the
skin, and the pioneers gave them all the
eatables left over from supper, and shared out
their blankets and clothes.  It was pure
Christianity--whatever creeds they may think they
believe.  And it is the glamour of the Front.
England feels cold and dull after it.  Kindness
and comradeship pervade the air in France.
You feel that everyone is a friend and brother.
It will be pretty hard for chaplains to go back
to their churches.  They have been spoiled by
too much kindness.  How can they go back
to the cold atmosphere of criticism and narrow
judgments which prevail in so many churches--that
is, unless the war has brought changes
there also?  And after preaching to dying men
who listen as it their destiny depended upon
their hearing, how can they go back to pulpits
where large numbers in the congregations
regard their messages as of less importance than
dinner, and as merely supplying material for
an exercise in more or less kindly criticism
during the discussion of that meal?

The glamour of the services at the Front!
How the scenes are photographed on my
heart!  As a congregation sits in a church at
home how stolid its features often are--how
dull its eyes!  One glance around and the
preacher's heart sinks within him and his
inspiration flies away.  Nothing is expected of
him, and nothing particularly desired.  People
have come by force of habit, and not of need.
But how the eyes of the soldiers in France glow
and burn; how their features speak, and make
the preacher speak in reply!  Who could help
being eloquent there!  Such faces would make
the dumb speak.  One can see the effect of his
words as plainly in their expressions as he can
see the effect of wind on a cornfield.  Every
emotion from humor to concern leaps from
the heart to the face as the subject touches
them at, first this point of their life, then at that.
The men's eyes are unforgettable.  Months
afterwards they come vividly to mind, and one
is back again answering the questions they
silently ask, and seeing the look of content or
gratitude that takes the place of the perplexed
or troubled expression.  Eyes are said to be
the windows of the soul, and as I have spoken
I have seen men's souls looking out.  At home
the windows are darkened and there seemed
to be no souls behind the panes.  The dwellers
within the houses are busy with other matters,
and will not come to the windows.  The
preacher feels like an organ-grinder in the
street--those who hear do not heed nor come
to the windows of the soul.  In France there
is a soul looking out at every window; and the
preacher sings--for his words grow rhythmic--to
his listeners of the love of God and of
the love of women and children which make
sweet this vale of tears and light man on his
lone way beyond the grave.

One Sunday in hospital, when we heard the
singing of a hymn in the ward below, a young
officer, in the next bed, turned to me and said:
"Why doesn't the chaplain hold a service for
us?  Why does he only hold them for the
Tommies?  We need them and want them,
just as much as the Tommies.  We are officers
but we are also men."  I passed the word to
the chaplain, and he was a joyful man when
in the evening he gave us a service and the
officers of the next ward asked the orderlies
to carry them in.

There is the same naturalness and spirit
of fellowship between members of various
churches.  Many lasting friendships have been
formed between chaplains of differing
communions.  There has been no change of creed
but something greater, a change of spirit.
They have been touched by the common spirit,
and have lived and worked in free and happy
fellowship.  On my last Sunday in a hospital
in France, the chaplain, a canon of the Church
of England, invited me to read the lesson at
the morning parade service, and to administer
the wine at Holy Communion.  This I did;
and a colonel who was present stayed behind
to express to us both the pleasure which had
been given to him by the sight of Anglican
and Methodist churchmen serving together at
the Lord's Table.

To a chaplain not a little of the glamour of
the Front is found in this warm fellowship
between men of differing creeds and varying
religious communions.  We have not knocked
down our garden walls but we have taken off
the cut glass that had been cemented on them
by our fathers; and now we can lean over and
talk to our neighbors.  We have already found
that our neighbors are human beings, and quite
normal.  The chief difference between us seems
to be that while one has an obsession for roses
the other has an obsession for dahlias.  On
pansies, sweet peas and chrysanthemums we
seem equally keen and exchange plants.  A
Roman Catholic officer who had been appointed
to the Ulster Division told me that though he
was received coldly at first, he had not been
with the Division more than a few weeks when
every officer in his regiment, and every soldier
in his company, accepted him as cordially as
if he were a Protestant.  He was from Dublin
and they from Belfast, but they did not allow
it to make any difference, and feelings of the
warmest loyalty and friendship sprang up.
His Tommies would fight to the death by his
side, as readily as around any Ulsterman; and
he was just as popular in the officers' mess.
When, he said, it passed the Irish Guards or
any other Roman Catholic regiment, his
regiment would sing some provoking song about
"hanging the Pope with a good strong rope,"
and the Dublin regiment would reply with some
song equally obnoxious and defiant; but whereas,
in peace time, the songs would have caused a free
fight to the accompaniment of bloodshed, now
it caused nothing worse than laughter.  The
songs were just a bit of teasing such as every
regiment likes to regale another with--perhaps,
too, a common memory of the dear
country they have left behind.  The men of
Belfast and the men of Dublin have learned
to respect and value one another.  They know
that in a scrap with the enemy they can count
on one another to the last drop of blood, for,
whether from North or South, the Irish are
"bonnie fighters."  Of such are the miracles
at the Front.

Most of all, perhaps, the glamour of the
Front is found in the nobility to which
common men rise.  An artillery officer told me
that he had in his battery a soldier who seemed
utterly worthless.  He was dirty in all his
ways, and unreliable in character.  In despair
they made him sanitary orderly, that is, the
scavenger whose duty it was to remove all
refuse.  One night the officer wanted a man
to go on a perilous errand and there were few
men available.  Instantly this lad volunteered.
The officer looked at him in amazement, and
with a reverence born on the instant.  "No,"
he thought, "I will not let him go and get
killed.  I'll go myself."  He told the lad so,
and disappointment was plainly written on his
features.

"But, you'll let me come with you, sir?" he replied.

"Why should two risk their lives," asked
the officer, "when one can do the job?"

"But you might get wounded, sir," was the
quick response; and they went together.

An Irish officer told me of one man who
seemed bad from top to toe.  All the others
had some redeeming feature but this man appeared
not to possess any.  He used the filthiest
language and was dirty in his habits and dress.
He was drunken and stole the officers' whisky
out of the mess.  He was unchaste and had
been in the hospital with venereal disease;
and neither as man nor soldier was there
anything good to say of him.  The regiment was
sent to France, and in due time took its place
in the trenches; and then appeared in this man
something that had never risen to the surface
before.  Wherever there were wounded and
dying men he proved himself to be the noblest
man in the regiment.  When a man fell in
No Man's Land, he was over the parapet in
the twinkling of an eye to bring him in.  No
barrage could keep him away from the
wounded.  It was a sort of passion with him
that nothing could restrain.  To save others
he risked his life scores of times.  In
rest-billets he would revert to some of his evil ways,
but in the trenches he was the Greatheart of
the regiment and, though he did not receive it,
he earned the Victoria Cross over and over
again.  There is a glamour at the Front that
holds the heart with an irresistible grip.  In
the light of War's deathly fires the hearts of
men are revealed and the black sheep often
get their chance.  Life is intense and deep and
men are drawn together by a common peril.
They find the things that unite and forget the
things that separate.

"We haven't long to live," said Captain Ball
joyfully, "but we live well while we *do* live,"
and in those words he expressed the glamour
of the Front.  Ball found, as thousands of his
comrades-in-arms had found, that

   |  "One crowded hour of glorious life
   |  Is worth an age without a name."





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.. _`A WHITE HANDKERCHIEF`:

.. class:: center large bold

   IV


.. class:: center large bold

   A WHITE HANDKERCHIEF

.. vspace:: 2

In his *History of the Somme Campaign*
John Buchan quotes, from an official
report, an incident which, though I have
tried, I cannot get my imagination to believe.
Probably the incident is a true one but,
unfortunately for me, my mind will not let it in.
I cannot visualize it and the report is turned
from the door as an impostor.  The report
states that in a certain attack our aeroplanes
fired on the Germans in their trenches and that
the enemy waved white handkerchiefs in token
of surrender.  Without the slightest difficulty
I can imagine all except the white handkerchiefs.
Where did they get them to wave?
Men in the firing trenches don't carry anything
so conspicuous as white handkerchiefs.  To
draw one out in a thoughtless moment might
bring a sniper's bullet, and there are risks
enough without inviting more.  I doubt if in
any English regiment two white handkerchiefs
could be found: and I have little expectation
that more could be found among the enemy.
Furthermore, it is questionable, at this stage
of the war, if a white handkerchief would be
regarded as a sign, of surrender.  It might be
taken as a taunt.

There is nothing more remarkable in the war
than the psychological change that has been
wrought in white.  A white feather used to
be the badge of cowardice and a white flag
the token of surrender.  It is not so now.
White has taken on a peculiar sacredness.  If
a new medal were to be struck of the same
high value as the Victoria Cross it would
probably be given a white ribbon, as the other
has a red or (for the navy) blue.  This
change in the moral significance of white was
brought home to me by an incident in a billet.
I had gone to a barn to give the men some
shirts and socks that had been sent to me.  I
stood on the steps, and like an auctioneer,
offered my goods for acceptance.  "Who wants
a shirt?  Who a scarf?  Who wants this pair
of mittens?  Who a pair of socks?"  Hands
shot up at each question, and the fun grew
fast and furious.  Then I drew out and held
up a white handkerchief.  "A-ah!  A-ah!" they
cried wistfully in chorus.  For a moment
they stood gazing at it and forgot to raise
their hands towards it; then, with a single
movement, every hand shot up.  Unwittingly
I had stirred them to the depths; and I felt
sorry for them.

The Magic Carpet of Baghdad is not a
fiction after all.  In the twinkling of an eye
my white handkerchief had carried every boy
and man to his home, and placed him by the
fireside.  I saw it in their eyes and heard it
in the sadness and wistfulness of their voices
as they ejaculated "A-ah!"  They had not
seen a white handkerchief for months.  The
last they saw was at home.  A vision of home
flashed before their minds and they were back
in the dear old days of peace when they used
white handkerchiefs and khaki ones were
unknown to them.  If in battle they were to see
Germans waving white handkerchiefs, I think
it would make them savage and unwilling to
give quarter.  They would think the enemy
was taunting them with all they had lost.  And
they would be maddened by the thought that
here were the very men who, by their war-lust,
had caused them to lose it.  For a German to
wave a white handkerchief before a British
soldier would be as dangerous as flaunting a
red flag before a bull.  It would bring death
rather than pity.  Anything of pure white is
rare at the front, and it has gradually taken
on a meaning it never held before.  About the
only white thing we have is the paper we write
home on, and that use of the color helps to
sanctify it in the shrine of the heart.

In the army it is a term of supreme praise
to call a man *white*.  When you say a comrade
is a "*white man*" there is no more to be said.
It is worth more than the Victoria Cross with
its red ribbon, for it includes gallantry, and
adds to it goodness.  A man must be brave to
be called white and he must be generous, noble
and good.  To reach whiteness is a great
achievement.  To be dubbed white is, in the
army, like being dubbed knight at King Arthur's
Court or canonized saint in the Church.  He
stands out among a soldier's comrades
distinct as a white handkerchief among khaki ones.

I don't know where the term came from,
but, wherever it may have tarried on the way,
I think its footprints could be traced back to
the Book of Revelation for its starting place.
In the first chapter we have a picture of Christ
as the first "White Man"--"His Head and
His Hairs were white like wool, as white as
snow."  In the second chapter His faithful
followers are given "a white stone, and in
the stone a new name written."  Is not the
new name "White man"?  In the third chapter
we read of "a few names even in Sardis which
have *not defiled their garments*; and they shall
*walk with Me in white*; for they are worthy."  There,
too, the Laodiceans are counseled to
buy "white raiment."  In the fourth chapter
we see the four and twenty elders, sitting
around the throne under the rainbow arch,
"clothed in white raiment."  In the sixth
chapter we have the crowned King going
"forth conquering, and to conquer" and He is
sitting on "a white horse," that is, He uses
"white" instruments to carry out His
conquests.  Death, in the same chapter, rides on
a "pale" horse, but not a "white" one.  Under
the altar were the souls of the martyrs, "And
white robes were given unto every one of
them."  And surely the climax is reached when
we read in the seventh chapter that "a great
multitude, which no man could number, of all
nations, and kindreds, and people and tongues,
stood before the throne, and before the Lamb,
clothed with white robes."  So striking was
the scene that one of the elders asked, "What
are these which are arrayed in white
robes? and whence came they?"  And the answer is
given, "These are they which came out of
great tribulation, and have washed their robes,
and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
Therefore are they before the throne of
God."  In the army white has come back to its
ancient significance.  The brave and noble
martyrs of the early Church were given "white
robes" and in the army to-day the brave and
pure wear "white robes" in the eyes of their
comrades.  When Clifford Reed was killed by
a shell at his Regimental Aid Post his colonel
wrote of him that he was the "whitest man"
he had ever known.  He had done more than
wear "the white flower of a *blameless* life."  His
virtues were positive, not merely negative.
He wore a "white *robe*"; not a mere speck of
white such as a white flower in a buttonhole
would appear.  White is a positive color, not
a negative.  Reed was more than "blameless,"
he was "white and all white."  To our soldiers
a white handkerchief speaks of home, and a
"white man" speaks of honor and heroism
and heaven.





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.. _`THE SONGS OUR SOLDIERS SING`:

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   V


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   THE SONGS OUR SOLDIERS SING

.. vspace:: 2

The necessity for poetry and song is fully
and officially recognized by the military
authorities at the Front.  Every Division
has its own concert party.  These men are
chosen out of the ranks because they can sing,
and their one task is to furnish nightly concerts
for the men.  They are provided with a good
hall, or tent, or open-air position; and they are
given enough money to buy stage scenery and
appropriate dress.  Everybody attends the
concerts from the general to the private; and
while the entertainments last, the war is
forgotten.  A charge is made at the door but the
balance sheet is published for all ranks to see;
and the profits are distributed among the
Divisional charities.

Among the many Divisional Concert Parties
may be named "The Bow Bells," "The Duds,"
"The Follies," "The Whizz-bangs," "The
Fancies" and, "The Giddigoats."  But, after
all, the singing in the concert rooms is but a
small fraction of the singing one hears in the
Army.  On every march, in every billet and
mess, there is the sound of singing.  Nor must
the singing at our religious services and in the
Y.M.C.A. huts be forgotten.  Song seems
to be the great renewer of hope and courage.
It is the joy bringer.  Moreover, it is an
expression of emotions that can find no other
voice.

There is no real difference between the songs
sung by the officers, and those sung by the men.
All attend the concerts and all sing on the
march.  The same songs do for both
commanders and commanded, and I have heard
the same songs in the men's billets as in the
officers' mess-rooms.  How real these songs are
to the soldiers is indicated by one striking
omission.  There are no patriotic songs at the
Front.  Except the National Anthem rendered
on formal occasions, I have never, in eighteen
months, heard a single patriotic song.  The
reason is not far to seek.  The soldiers'
patriotism calls for no expression in song.
They are expressing it night and day in the
endurance of hardship and wounds--in the
risking of their lives.  Their hearts are
satisfied with their deeds, and songs of such a
character become superfluous.  In peace-time they
sing their love of the homeland, but in
war-time they suffer for her and are content.  They
would never think of singing a patriotic song
as they march into battle.  It would be painting
the lily and gilding refined gold.  Are not their
deathless deeds, songs for which they make a
foil by singing some inconsequential and
evanescent song such as, "There's something in the
sea-side air."

On analysis I should say that there are five
subjects on which our soldiers sing.  First, there
are Nonsense Songs or, if you prefer it, songs
of soldier-philosophy.  They know that no
theory will explain the war; it is too big a thing
for any sheet of philosophy to cover.  It has
burst in on our little hum-drum life like a
colliding planet.  The thing to do is not to evolve
a theory as to how the planet got astray but
to clear up the mess it has made.  Our soldiers
show this sense of the vastness of war-happenings,
by singing of things having no real
importance at all, and keeping steadily at their
duties.  The path of duty is, they find, the only
path of sanity.  The would-be war philosopher
they put on one side.  The war is too big for
him.  Let him leave his explanation of the war
and lend a hand to bring it to an end.  So they
sing, with laughing irony,

   |  "We're here because we're here, because
   |  We're here, because we're here."

Or,

   |  "While you've got a lucifer to light your fag,
   |  Smile, boys, that's the style.
   |  What's the use of worrying?
   |  It never was worth while,
   |  So pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag
   |  And smile, smile, smile."

Another favorite is,

   |  "Oh, there was a little hen and she had a wooden leg,
   |  The best little hen that ever laid an egg,
   |  And she laid more eggs than any hen on the farm,
   |  And another little drink wouldn't do us any harm."

I have seen them dancing round some old piano
singing,

   |  "Oh, that fascinating Bow Bells' glide,
   |  It's a captivating Bow Bells' slide.
   |  There's a rumor that the puma does it now,
   |  Monkeys have taken to it,
   |  Leopards and lions do it.
   |  All the elephants wear dancing shoes,
   |  They keep hopping with the kangaroos;
   |  Hear them chatter, it's a matter for some talk;
   |  Now the Jungle's got the Bow Bells' walk."
   |

The second class of song is the Love Song,
of a more or less serious character.  The
Tommies came out of England singing "Tipperary,"
but they dropped it in France, and the only one
on whose lips I have heard it was a little French
boy sitting on the tail of a cart.  The chorus
alone gave it popularity for it was the
expression, ready to hand, of a long farewell; and
with its "long long way to go" showed that,
like Kitchener, the soldiers were not deceived
by hopes of an early peace.

Now another song with verses more expressive
of their sentiments has taken its place.
The chorus runs:

   |  "There's a long, long trail a-winding
   |    Into the land of my dreams,
   |  Where the nightingales are singing
   |    And a white moon beams;
   |  There's a long, long night of waiting
   |    Until my dreams all come true;
   |  Till the day when I'll be going down
   |    That long, long trail with you."

Then the mood changes, and we hear the lads
piping out,

   |  "Taffy's got his Jennie in Glamorgan,
   |    Sandy's got his Maggie in Dundee,
   |  While Michael O'Leary thinks of his dearie
   |    Far across the Irish Sea.
   |  Billy's got his Lily up in London,
   |    So the boys march on with smiles;
   |  For every Tommy's got a girl somewhere
   |    In the dear old British Isles."

Again the mood veers round, and we hear,

   |  "Every little while I feel so lonely,
   |    Every little while I feel so blue,
   |  I'm always dreaming, I'm always scheming,
   |    Because I want you, and only you.
   |  Every little while my heart is aching,
   |    Every little while I miss your smile,
   |  And all the time I seem to miss you;
   |  I want to, want to kiss you,
   |    Every, every, every little while."
   |

Here is part of a song I have heard sung,
many and many a time, by young officers and
men whose voices are now silent in death:

   |  "If you were the only girl in the world,
   |  And I were the only boy,
   |  Nothing else would matter in the world to-day,
   |  We could go on loving in the same old way;
   |  A Garden of Eden just made for two,
   |  With nothing to mar our joy;
   |  I would say such wonderful things to you,
   |  There would be such wonderful things to do,
   |  If you were the only girl in the world,
   |  And I were the only boy."
   |

Sometimes the imagination will wander into
the days that are to be--for some--and they
sing,

   |  "We don't want a lot of flags flying,
   |    We don't want your big brass bands;
   |  We don't want a lot of speechifying,
   |    And we don't want a lot of waving hands;
   |  We don't want a lot of interfering,
   |    When we've safely crossed the foam;
   |  But we *do* want to find the girls we left behind,
   |    When we all come marching home."
   |

Will the girls remember!  The words are
not without tragedy.  How deeply some of the
men love may perhaps never be realized by
those at home.  The longing of their hearts is,
at times, almost unbearable.  A captain, past
middle life, took my arm one day and led me
aside.  He was, he said, a little anxious about
himself, for he was getting into the habit of
taking more drink than he was wont to take.
He had been taking it when he felt lonely and
depressed to ease the longing of his heart.

"I never touch it at home," he said, "the
society of my dear little wife is all the stimulant
I need.  I would give the world to be with
her now--just to sit in my chair and watch her
at her sewing or knitting.  The separation is
too much for me and, you know, it has lasted
nearly three years now."

I have caught this yearning in more than one
of the songs our soldiers sing, but especially in
the following, which is called "Absent":

   |  "Sometimes, between long shadows on the grass,
   |  The little truant waves of sunlight pass;
   |  My eyes grow dim with tenderness, the while
   |  Thinking I see thee, thinking I see thee smile.

   |  "And sometimes in the twilight gloom, apart,
   |  The tall trees whisper, whisper heart to heart;
   |  From my fond lips the eager answers fall,
   |  Thinking I hear thee, thinking I hear thee call."
   |

The men's thoughts pass easily from the
sweetheart to the mother who bore them, and
we have a third class, the Home Song.  I
have been awakened in the night by men, going
up to the line, singing "Keep the Home Fires
Burning."  It is very thrilling to hear in the
dead of night, when every singer is within range
of the enemy's guns.

Another great favorite is,

   |  "They built a little garden for the rose,
   |    And they called it Dixie-land;
   |  They built a summer breeze to keep the snows
   |    Far away from Dixie-land;
   |  They built the finest place I've known,
   |    When they built my home sweet home;
   |  Nothing was forgotten in the land of cotton,
   |    From the clover to the honey-comb,
   |  And then they took an angel from the skies
   |    And they gave her heart to me.
   |  She had a bit of heaven in her eyes
   |    Just as blue as blue can be;
   |  They put some fine spring chickens in the land,
   |    And taught my Mammy how to use a frying pan.
   |  They made it twice as nice as paradise,
   |    And they called it Dixie-land."
   |

Being Londoners, the following song called
"Leave" never fails in its appeal to our Division:

   |  "I'm so delighted, I'm so excited,
   |  With my folks I'm going to be united.
   |  The train's departing, 'twill soon be starting;
   |  I'll see my mother, my dad and my baby brother.
   |  My!  How I'll meet them, My! how I'll greet them.
   |  What a happy happy day.
   |  Just see that bustle, I'd better hustle,
   |  Good-bye--so long--can't stay--

   |  Chorus

   |  "I'm on my way back to dear old Shepherd's Bush,
   |  That's the spot where I was born,
   |  Can't you hear the porter calling,
   |  Queen's Road, Piccadilly, Marble Arch and Bond Street?
   |  Oh, I'll not hesitate, I'll reach the gate;
   |  Through the crowd I mean to push,
   |  Find me a seat anywhere--please anywhere,
   |  Tram, train, tube, 'bus I don't care--
   |  For mother and daddy are waiting there--
   |  In dear old Shepherd's Bush."
   |

On the eve of one big battle, a soldier
handed me a letter in which he gave me the
addresses of his father and his sweetheart, so
that I could write to them if he fell.

"In the last battle," he said, "one of my
brothers was killed and another wounded.  If I
fall I shall die without regrets and with a heart
content; but it will go hard with those at home;
and I want you to break the news gently.
These are terrible times for those at home."  "These
are terrible times *for those at home*."  That
is their constant refrain, and it finds an
echo in a song often sung by them.

   |  "It's a long long way to my home in Kentucky,
   |    Where the blue-bells grow 'round the old cabin door;
   |  It's a long, long way and I'll be mighty lucky
   |    When I see my dear old mammy once more.
   |  So weep no more, my lady,
   |    Just brush those tears away;
   |  It's a long long way to my home in Kentucky,
   |    But I'm bound to get there some day."
   |

But the chief favorite of all Home Songs is,
I think, the following:

   |  "There's an old-fashioned house in an old-fashioned street;
   |    In a quaint little old-fashioned town;
   |  There's a street where the cobble stones harass the feet,
   |    As it straggles up hill and then down;
   |  And, though to and fro through the world I must go,
   |    My heart while it beats in my breast,
   |  Where e'er I may roam, to that old-fashioned home
   |    Will fly like a bird to its nest.

   |  "In that old-fashioned house in that old-fashioned street,
   |    Dwell a dear little old-fashioned pair;
   |  I can see their two faces so tender and sweet,
   |    And I love every wrinkle that's there.
   |  I love ev'ry mouse in that old-fashioned house
   |    In the street that runs up hill and down;
   |  Each stone and each stick, ev'ry cobble and brick,
   |    In that quaint little old-fashioned town."
   |

The charm of the Army is its comradeship.
Our soldiers have left their homes and friends
but they have found new friends, and some of
the friendships have become very precious.
Men slept side by side in barn and trench,
cooked their rations at the same little wood fire,
and stood together in the hour of danger and
imminent death.  Many of them owe their lives
to their comrades.  There are few songs that
express this wonderful comradeship, but there
is one that is known and sung through the
army.  It represents the Songs of Comradeship:

   |  "When you come to the end of a perfect day,
   |    And you sit alone with your thought,
   |  While the chimes ring out with a carol gay,
   |    For the joy that the day has brought;
   |  Do you think what the end of a perfect day
   |    Can mean to a tired heart,
   |  When the sun goes down with a flaming ray,
   |    And the dear friends have to part?

   |  "Well, this is the end of a perfect day,
   |    Near the end of a journey too;
   |  But it leaves a thought that is big and strong,
   |    With a wish that is kind and true.
   |  For mem'ry has painted this perfect day
   |    With colors that never fade;
   |  And we find at the end of a perfect day
   |    *The soul of a friend we've made*."
   |

The fifth class of song is that of the inner
life.  It is the Religious Hymn.  The soldiers
are extremely fond of hymns in their services.
You cannot give them too many.  "Rock of
Ages," "Jesus lover of my soul," "Fight the
good fight," "There is a green hill," "At even
ere the sun was set," "O God our help in ages
past," and "Eternal Father strong to save"
cannot be chosen too often.  But there are two
hymns which have stood out above all others;
they are "Abide with me," and "When I
survey the wondrous Cross."

There is nothing written by the hand of man
which can compete with these two in the
blessing and strength which they have brought to our
soldiers, especially during an offensive when
death has cast his shadow over the hearts of
all.  During the bitterest weeks in the Somme
fighting there was scarcely a service in which
we did not sing "When I survey the wondrous
Cross."  With its assurance of redemption it
gave comfort in the face of death.  It also
gave, for an example, the Supreme Sacrifice.

Some of the songs I have quoted look bare
and ungainly as trees in winter, but when the
musician has clothed them with music and the
singer added to them a touch of his own
personality they are fair as trees in summer.  Still
the fact remains that none of these songs will
live on their own merits.  They are not born
to immortality.  Like the daisies they have
their day and pass away to make room for
others.  It is best so.  There is not room in
the world for everything to be immortal, and
the transient has a work of its own to do.
The charm and rare beauty of the English
countryside are due to the transience of its
flowers and foliage and little of the evergreen
is enough.  We tire of the eternal.  The
transient songs I have quoted here have been
meat and drink to our soldiers in the most
terrible war ever waged.  They may be poor stuff
in comparison with our classic songs but a good
appetite can get nourishment out of plain food
and grow strong on it.  For the purpose in
hand these songs have been better than the
classics; otherwise they would not have been
chosen.  There is a time and place for all
things.  The robin may not be compared with
the nightingale but it is not the less welcome,
for it sings when the nightingale is silent.  Our
soldiers' songs will die, some are already dead,
but they have done their work and justified
their existence.  They have given pleasure and
strength to men as they went out to do
immortal deeds.  No wounded soldier, or parched
traveler, thinks lightly of a cup of water
because it perished in the using; and so it is with
the songs our soldiers sing.





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.. _`EASTER SUNDAY`:

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   VI


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   EASTER SUNDAY

.. vspace:: 2

Night and day for a week, the fearful
bombardment continued.  Our guns
were everywhere, and belching forth
without intermission.  Dumps of shells were
almost as common as sheaves in a corn-field,
and processions of ammunition-wagons piled
the shells up faster than the gorging guns
could take them.  The noise was something
beyond imagination.  It was as though all the
devils in hell had come out to demoniacally
celebrate the end of the world.  We were
living--two transport officers and I--in an empty
farm-house that, some time before we came in,
had been a target for direct hits.  One shell
had gone through the roof, and another
through the gable wall.  The windows had
been shattered, and the garden and fields were
pitted with shell-holes.  Our first care had been
to look at the cellar, but we had decided, if
things became too hot, to make for the open
fields.  We all slept in the same room, and
were at times wakened up by "an arrival" and
passed an opinion as to its distance.  If, for
a time, none came nearer, we turned over and
went to sleep again, for a man must sleep even
though it be on the edge of a volcano.

One morning the servants found a shell
nose-cap beneath the window--just that, and
nothing more.  The week was wearing on.
Another morning some of the 7th Middlesex
Regiment were in the baths in the village over
the way, and a company of the London
Scottish was passing by.  Two shells fell in the
road.  The bathers scampered out of the bath
and ran naked, here and there, for shelter;
the Scottish "scattered"; but some forty-five
soldiers, mostly kilted, lay in the road dead
or wounded.  In the dead of night a party of
machine gunners, just returned from the
firing-trench, stood outside their billet in our village
square debating if they should make a cup of
tea before turning in to sleep.  A shell
decided the matter, and, next morning, I laid
two of them to rest in the little cemetery, and
the others stood by as mourners.

The week of terror reached its crisis on the
Sunday--an Easter Sunday never to be
forgotten.  The infantry of the Brigade had been
away to a camp, beyond range, for a week's
rest.  They had now returned ready for the
battle.  Three of the regiments had taken up
their positions in the reserve trenches, but my
own regiment was quartered in the fatal
village.  The day dawned bright and fair, but
its smiles were the smiles of a deceiver.  The
Germans had decided on the destruction of the
village, a sort of devil's "hail-and-farewell"
before being driven back at the points of
bayonets.  We were awakened by the firing of
machine-guns over our heads, and rushed to the
door to see a fight in the air.  High up in the
blue, two aeroplanes circled about for
positions of vantage, and then rushed at one another
like hawks in mortal combat.  A silence
followed.  Then one rose and made off towards
the battle-line but fell to a shot of our
gunners before it could reach safety.  The other,
with its petrol-tank on fire, was planing down
to earth.  Down and down an invisible spiral
staircase it seemed to rush, while the golden
fire burnt at its vitals, and a trailing cloud
of smoke marked its path of doom.  Breathlessly
we watched its descent.  It was under
perfect control, but its path to the ground was
too long and spiral, and the faster it rushed
through the air the greater the draught
became and the more madly the flames leapt up.
Every second was precious and the certainty
of its doom made us sick.  We saw the body
of the observer fall out, and still the flaming
machine pursued its course.  Then the wings
fell away and twirled to the ground like
feathers, while the engine and the pilot dropped
like a stone.  When the bodies were picked
up, it was found that the observer had been
shot through the head, and that the pilot, with
his dead comrade behind him, had worked the
wheel until the furious encroaching flame had
swept over him, and robbed him of mortal life.

Shells were now dropping in the village
every few minutes.  Our farm-house was on the
right wing, and we stood watching the
bombardment.  With each burst there rose a cloud
of black smoke and red brick-dust, and we
knew that another cottage has been destroyed.
Then the shells began to creep round to the
right as if the enemy was feeling for the
bridge over which the ammunition wagons
were passing.  On one side of the little bridge
was a white bell-tent, and we watched the
shells dropping within a few feet of it
without destroying it.  Between the tent and our
street lay a stagnant pool, and we saw about
a dozen shells fall in its water.  The range
was lengthening and it seemed as if some
invisible octopus were stretching out its feelers
towards us.  A shell smashed against the
farm-house at the bottom of our street.  The
deadly thing was coming nearer.  Some of our
sergeants were in a farm-house a few doors
away, and, hearing a shell fall in the field
between them and the pool, they came to the
decision that the moment had come "to
scatter," but they were too late.  It would have
been better had they stayed indoors.  As they
rushed out a shell burst over the yard three
of them fell to the ground dead, and three
more were blown back into the house by the
force of the explosion.  The coping stone of
the outhouse where the shell burst was blown
away and three ragged seams were scored on
the green doorway of the yard outside which
the three lads lay dead.  One of them had,
ten days before, shown me to my billet thirty
yards farther up.  He acted as interpreter to
the regiment and as he had not to go into the
line, we thought that he was one of those who
would see the end of the war.  Yet there he lay.

But the worst calamity of the day was yet
to befall.  Some fifteen or sixteen ammunition
wagons, unable to get through the village, had
halted in the Square--"Wipers Square" it had
been named.  Each wagon was loaded with
nine-point-two shells.  An enemy-shot fell on a
wagon and set it on fire; then the village
became like unto Sodom and Gomorrah on their
day of doom.  One or two drivers bravely
stuck to their wagons, and got them out but
the rest of the wagons were lost.  The scene
that followed was indescribable.  Doré could
never have pictured such horrors.  The wagons
all caught fire and their loads of shells began
to explode.  We stood out in the fields and
watched the conflagration, while all the time
the Germans continued to shell the village.
The large village-hall and the houses on each
side of the square were utterly destroyed.
Great explosions sent fragments of wagons and
houses sky-high, and showers of missiles fell
even where we stood.  The fore part of one
wagon was blown on to the roof of a house.
Houses caught fire and blazed all afternoon.
Some machine-gunners joined us and told how,
when choking smoke began to penetrate into
their cellar they had to rush through the square
and its bursting shells to preserve their lives.
A German shell burst in a billet where a platoon
of our men were sheltering in the cellar, and
those who were not killed by the shell were
crushed to death by the fall of the house.
Another shell hit the roof of the house in the
cellar of which was our Advanced Dressing
Station for the morrow's battle.  Two
orderlies who happened to be in the street were
killed, and the colonel was knocked down.  In
the cellars of almost every house were soldiers
or civilians, and all day the ammunition wagons
continued burning; shell after shell getting red
hot and exploding.

All day the German bombardment continued
and, amid a terrific din, our own gunners
returned a score or more for every one received.
By the bridge another long line of loaded
ammunition wagons stood for two hours, and
though shells were bursting close by, not one
hit the wagons.  The drivers stood by them
and, as soon as the road was cleared, got them
away to the guns.  Yet, while the Square was
burning and the German shells falling,
hundreds of men from the London regiments
entered the village from the right, and crossed
the bridge to stack their packs so as to be
ready for the coming battle.  They walked in
single file and with wide gaps between, but not
a man ran or quickened his pace.  My blood
tingled with pride at their courage and anger
at their carelessness.  What *would* make a
British soldier run?  An officer was walking
near the pool.  A shell fell near enough for
fragments to kill him, but he merely looked
round, stopped to light a cigarette and walked
leisurely on as if nothing had happened.
Three men stood with their backs against a
small building near the bridge as if sheltering
from the rain.  Several shells fell
uncomfortably near, so, concluding that the rain had
changed its direction, they moved round the
corner.  And it was not till more shells had
fallen near them that they condescended to
move away altogether.

Yet this was not bravado for, so far as they
knew, no one was watching them.  It was due
to a certain dignity peculiar to our fighting
man.  He is too proud to acknowledge defeat.
He is a man, and whether any one is watching
or not, he is not going to run away from a
shell.  Hundreds of lives must have been lost
through this stubborn pride but, on the other
hand, thousands of lives must have been saved
by it, for it makes the Army absolutely proof
against panic, than which, nothing is so fatal
in war.  In eighteen months on the Front I
have never seen or heard of a single case of
panic either with many or few.  Our soldiers
are always masters of themselves.  They have
the coolness to judge what is the wisest thing
to do in the circumstances, and they have the
nerve to carry it out.  They run unnecessary
risks through pride but never through panic.
All that day on the bridge, a military
policeman stood at his post of duty.  Like Vesuvius
of old the exploding shells in the Square sent
up their deadly eruption, and like the Roman
sentry at Pompeii, he stood at his post.  As
he stood there I saw a young French woman
leave her house and pass him on the bridge.
She was leaving the village for a safer place
but she seemed quite composed and carried a
basket on her left arm.

While our village was being destroyed we
were startled by a tremendous explosion a few
miles away; and looking to our left we saw
a huge tongue of flame leap up to the sky,
followed by a wonderful pillar of smoke which
stood rigid for some moments like a monster
tower of Babel reaching up to the heavens.
Evidently a dump of cordite had been fired
by an enemy shell.  Farther off still, another
dump was on fire.  Time and again, bright
flames leapt from the ground only to be
smothered again by dense curling masses of smoke.
It seemed as if our whole front was on fire,
and news came to us that our main road of
communication had been heavily shelled, and
was now strewn with dead horses and men.
Before the battle of the Somme there were no
signs and portents so terrible as these: It was
evident that the enemy knew what was in store
for him on the morrow, and was preparing
against it, but if the prelude was so magnificent
in its terror, what would the battle be?
Imagination staggered under the contemplation.  By
four o'clock the bombardment was almost at an
end, and nearly all the shells in the Square had
exploded.  The soldiers began to creep out of
the cellars.  On passing through the Square we
were amazed at the sight.  In fact the
Transport Officer passed through at my side without
recognizing the place.  At the entrance was a
team of six dead mules lying prone on the
ground and terribly torn.  Two rows of houses
had disappeared, leaving mere heaps of stones
in their places.  The pavement was torn up,
and the wrecks of the ammunition wagons lay
scattered about.  Two houses were still
burning.  Our colonel and adjutant we found by
the side of the stream.  They had been in a
cellar near the Square all day but, fortunately,
they were little the worse for the experience.
They were giving orders for the assembling
of the scattered regiment.

By this time, civilians were leaving the
cellars, and with armfuls of household goods
hastening from the village.  To them it seemed
the end of all things--the day of doom.  Some
of them had slight wounds and as they passed
us they cried mournfully, "Finis, Messieurs,
Finis."  All was lost.  This exodus of the
despairing civilians was the saddest sight of the
day.  By sunset the regiment had been gathered
together--all except the wounded who had
been sent to the Main Dressing Station and
the dead who had been placed side by side and
covered with blankets.  Most of our officers
and men had lost all their belongings, but in
the twilight they marched out of the village
and took their places in the reserve trenches
near the other battalions.  These had suffered
no losses.  They had been saved the long day's
agony.  Early in the morning the battle was
to begin but the Westminsters knew that no
worse experience could await them than that
through which they had already passed.

Next morning I buried, near the ruined
church, the bodies of the sergeants who had
been killed a few doors from us; and on the
following day I laid to rest, side by side, in one
long grave, two drivers who had died at their
posts in the Square, together with an officer
and twenty men belonging to the 1st Queen's
Westminster Rifles.





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   VII


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   "NOW THE DAY IS OVER"

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Achicourt is a little village about
a mile out of Arras.  It has two
churches, one Roman Catholic, the
other, Lutheran.  The former church has been
utterly destroyed by German shells, and will
have to be rebuilt from the foundations.  The
Lutheran church was less prominently placed,
and its four walls are still standing.  Its
humility has saved it, but, as by fire.  All its
windows are gone, and its walls are torn and
scarred by fragments of shells.  Most of its
slates have been destroyed and the rain pours
through the roof.  But, on dry days, and until
the Battle of Arras, it was a beloved little
place for services.  It stood, however, at a
corner of the village Square, and the Square
was destroyed by hundreds of exploding shells
on Easter Sunday.  As I passed it in the
afternoon of that day, and saw how it had suffered,
my heart grew sad within me.

Often it had sheltered us at worship, and
many of our most sacred memories will, for
ever, cling like ivy to its walls.  The door was
smashed in, the vestibule torn into strips as
by lightning.  The pews were strewn on the
floor with their backs broken; even the frames
of the windows had been blown out.  There
was a little portable organ that we had used
with our hymns, and it lay mutilated on the
floor like a slaughtered child.  The floor was
white with plaster, as when a sharp frost has
brought low the cherry blossom.  Never again,
I thought, should I gather my men for worship
within its humble, hospitable walls.  One more
of the beautiful and sacred things of life had
perished in this all-devouring war.  Only the
fields remained, and there all my future services
must be held.

But "fears may be liars" and so mine proved.
I had reckoned without the man in khaki--that
master of fate whose head "beneath the
bludgeonings of chance, is bloody but
unbowed."  In a week he had cleared the Square
of its dead--mules and men--filled in its
craters, and cleared away the debris that
blocked the roads.  He was even removing the
fallen houses in order to mend the roads with
their bricks and stones; and he had thrown
together all the scraps of iron for salvage.
There I found, lying side by side, the burned
tin-soldiers of the children; officers' revolvers
which, being loaded, had exploded in the heat;
bayonets and rifle-barrels of the men; broken
sewing machines of the women.  He had taken
in hand, too, the little church.  Sacking was
spread across the windows; the remnants of
the little organ were carefully placed under
the pulpit where they lay like the body of a
saint beneath an altar; the floor was swept of
its fallen plaster.  The pews were repaired and
placed in order again, and a new door was
made.  Even timber was brought for a new
vestibule.  The wood was rough and
unpainted--Tommy had to use what he could
get--but it served.  The twisted railings were
drawn away from the entrance, and, on the
following Sunday, we were back in our old
sanctuary.  We felt that it was more sacred
than ever.  These are the deeds of our
fighting-man that make us love him so much, and
these are the acts of kindness and common
sense that make us admire our commanders.
Both officers and men have the heart of a lion
in the hour of battle, the gentleness of a lamb
when it is over.  Whatever their circumstances,
they cannot cease to be gentlemen, nor forget
the fathers that begat them.

Let him who doubts the future of England
come hither.  He will see the past through the
present, and the future through both.  Tommy's
eyes are the crystal gazing-glasses in which he
will discern the future.  Tommy is living
history and the prophecy of the future made
flesh.  The pessimists have not seen Tommy
here, and that is why they are what they are.
"Age cannot wither nor custom stale" his
infinite freshness and resource.  He is a sword
that the rust of time cannot corrode, nor the
might of an enemy break, and he will be found
flashing wherever there are wrongs to right and
weak to be defended.  On Easter Sunday he
was calmly enduring the horror of the German
bombardment and the explosions of his own
dump of shells.  On Easter Monday he was
driving the Germans at the point of his bayonet,
or accepting their surrender at the doors of
their dug-outs!  On Easter Tuesday and
Wednesday he was repairing a little French
chapel for worship.  Take him which day
you will, and you will find him mighty hard to
match.  To me he is the king of men, and
his genius, cheerfulness and resourcefulness
beyond the range of explanations.

After some weeks of fighting we had come
to our last Sunday in Achicourt, and were
gathered for the evening service.  The chapel
was jammed with officers and men, but not all
my flock was there.  There was Rifleman
Gibson absent.  He was carrying his beloved
Lewis gun in an attack when a bullet struck
him, and he died, as his comrades report, with
a smile upon his face.  Before going into the
battle he had given me his father's address
and thanked me for the spiritual help he had
received at the services.  It was his farewell
to me, and his father now has the penciled
words.  And Rifleman Stone was absent, too.
He was but a boy, and beautiful with youth
and goodness.  His comrades loved him as
David loved Jonathan, with a love passing the
love of women.  Every day, they told me in
their grief, he knelt in the trench to say his
prayers and to read his Bible.  One night after
praying he laid him down and slept.  He had
often sung the evening hymn:

   |  "Jesus protects; my fears, be gone!
   |    What can the Rock of Ages move?
   |  Safe in Thy arm I lay me down,
   |    Thy everlasting arms of love.

   |  "While Thou art intimately nigh,
   |    Who, then, shall violate my rest?
   |  Sin, earth, and hell I now defy;
   |    I lean upon my Saviour's breast.

   |  "Me for Thine own Thou lov'st to take,
   |    In time and in eternity,
   |  Thou never, never wilt forsake
   |    A helpless soul that trusts in Thee."

And as he slept, God took him from the
misery of this world--took him without
waking him.  His broken-hearted comrades
gathered together his broken body, and a friend,
a Congregational preacher, who, though over
military age, was serving in the ranks, read the
burial service over him.  Lance-corporal
Gilbert James was missing, too--he whom I had
known to lose his breakfast to attend a service
in a cold, dirty, old barn.  And many others
were absent whose departure to the Land beyond
our mortal reach was to us like the putting
out of stars.

We were leaving the Arras front and we
sang a hymn for those who had taken our places:

   |  "O Lord of Hosts, Whose mighty arm
   |  In safety keeps 'mid war's alarm,
   |  Protect our comrades at the Front
   |  Who bear of war the bitter brunt.
   |    And in the hour of danger spread
   |    Thy sheltering wings above each head,

   |  "In battle's harsh and dreadful hour,
   |  Make bare Thine arm of sovereign power,
   |  And fight for them who fight for Thee,
   |  And give to justice, victory.
   |    O in the hour of danger spread
   |    Thy sheltering wings above each head.

   |  "If by the way they wounded lie,
   |  O listen to their plaintive cry;
   |  And rest them on Thy loving breast,
   |  O Thou on Whom the cross was pressed;
   |    And in the hour of danger shed
   |    Thy glorious radiance o'er each head.

   |  "When pestilence at noonday wastes,
   |  And death in triumph onward hastes,
   |  O Saviour Christ, remember Nain,
   |  And give us our beloved again.
   |    In every ward of sickness tread,
   |    And lay Thy hand upon each head.

   |  "O Friend and Comforter divine,
   |  Who makest light at midnight shine,
   |  Give consolation to the sad
   |  Who in the days of peace were glad.
   |    And in the hour of sorrow spread
   |    Thy wings above each drooping head.
   |                                  Amen."

I had to find a new voice to start it, for our
little organ had been destroyed by a shell,
and our precentor was lying in a grave beside
his Medical Aid Post at Guemappe.  When,
on Good Friday, we had sung the hymn
before, the regiment returned from rest billets to
the line, he had started the tune.  His love
for music was second only to that of risking
his life for the wounded.  In one of his letters
given me to censor, he had written, "How nice
it will be to be back in my old place in the
choir."  But he was destined not to go back.
His path was onward and upward, and his
place was in the heavenly choir.  I had seen
it in his large, tender blue eyes.  There was
in them an expression as if he had seen "the
land that is very far off."  I felt that he was
chosen as a sacrifice--that the seal of God was
on his forehead.

Still, we had to sing, though his voice was
silent.  So we sang--several tunes, for hymns
seemed all our spirits needed.  What need
was there for a sermon when we had hymns?
We left the rag-time type of hymn and sang
the real deep things that come from men's
hearts, and ever after are taken up by their
fellows to express their deepest aspirations and
experiences.  The ruined chapel vibrated with
music, and men, I am told, stood in the street
to listen while "Jesus, Lover of my Soul,"
"Rock of Ages," "When I Survey the
Wondrous Cross" and "The Sands of Time are
Sinking" told of the faith and love that lift
up the heart.  We also sang "Abide with
Me."  After hearing us sing it one night, a Roman
Catholic officer in the regiment, a Canadian
and one of the bravest, most beloved men that
ever walked, told me that he was a
great-grandson of the author.  He is in hospital
now with severe wounds, but his men were present.

"Couldn't we take up a collection for the
repair of the chapel when peace comes?"
whispered a rifleman; "it would be a sort of
thanksgiving for the good times we have had
in it, and for the kindness of the congregation
in giving us the use of it so freely."

I put the suggestion to the men and they
voted for it with enthusiasm.  Two of them
went round with their caps and out of their
shallow purses the big-hearted fellows gave
over 100 francs.  In the name of the men I
presented the full caps to a lady of the
congregation who was present, and she was
moved to tears.  The time was quickly passing,
so I mounted the pulpit and told them of
words spoken after the earth's first great
trouble, when the black wings of death had
cast their shadow over every home: "And God
said, I do set my bow in the cloud, and it
shall be for a token of a covenant between me
and the earth.  And it shall come to pass, when
I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow
shall be seen in the cloud."

"God," I said, "has made a covenant with
man, for man is His neighbor and subject; and
there must be an understanding between them,
if there is to be peace and happiness.  Man
must know God's will or he will grieve Him
and there will be discord and pain.  Also, man
must know God's intentions concerning him,
and something of His ways, or else he will live
in fear and dread of the Almighty One in
whose power he lies.  There were no books
and parchment in the first days, so God took
the sky for His parchment, and dipping His
fingers in the most lovely of colors, wrote out
His covenant with man.  He spread it out
between earth and heaven so that man might look
up and see it without obstruction, and so that
He Himself might look down on it and
remember His agreement.  'The bow,' He said,
'shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon
it, that I may remember the everlasting
covenant.'"

"When you draw up a covenant with a neighbor,
you look well at it and then give it to your
attorney, who puts it away in the darkness
of the safe.  But it is taken out at intervals
for fresh examination.  And the rainbow-covenant
was put away behind the clouds, to be
brought out again from time to time to bring
comfort and strength to man by its appearance.
The rainbow is only half seen by man.
The lower half of its circle is lost in the
earth.  It exists, but unseen.  And the full
circle of God's beautiful covenant with man
has never appeared to our eyes.  A full half
is lost in the unapprehending darkness of
man's mind.  The full purpose of God is not
realized.  His plans are too vast and glorious
for the intellect or imagination to span; but
half the rainbow is seen and it is enough.
Seeing half we can take the rest on trust.  In the
covenant we are assured that we shall never be
given darkness without light, winter without
summer, seedtime without harvest, death
without birth, sorrow without joy, or a thick cloud
without a rainbow.  He binds Himself not to
give evil without good, or to bring tears
without laughter.  "I do set My bow in the cloud;
and it shall come to pass when I bring a cloud
over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud."

"A rainbow is made up of rain and sunshine
and life is woven of the same stuff--tears and
laughter.  The most glorious sunshine is
incapable of a rainbow without the co-operation
of the dark trailing clouds; and it is impossible
for the human character to reach its ripest
maturity and beauty on joy alone.  Sorrow is
as beneficent and necessary as joy.  There are
untutored natives who dread the rainbow.
They believe that it is a serpent that rises out
of the pools to devour men; and there are
unbelieving men in cultured lands who dread
adversity no less.  They do not believe that
*God* 'brings the cloud.'  The rainbow is their
refutation and it is written across the sky for
all to see.  On the other hand, there are
unbelieving men who see only the cloud and are
blind to the sunshine.  To them life is one long
tragedy.  It is an immense futility.  They
regard man as a mere cork in the sea, thrown
about by blind, deaf, unintelligible natural
forces void of purpose; active indeed but
ungoverned.  Human life to them is a black
cloud driven through immensity by the winds
of unintelligent fate.  It has no meaning and
its darkness is the deeper because they cannot
call a halt and disperse it into nothingness.
Like Job's wife they would say 'Curse God and
die,' yet they cannot die.  But Job, as he sits
on the dunghill, looks up at the rainbow and
finds a truer philosophy.  'What?' says he,
'shall we receive good at the hand of God, and
shall we not receive evil?'  Under the rainbow's
arch there are fruitful fields and beautiful
gardens for where the rainbow hangs in air
there is sunshine and there is rain--the parents
of fruitfulness.  And to whom God gives in
equal measure joy and sorrow there is beauty
and fruitfulness of heart and life.  His promise
to 'every living creature' is that He will never
send the cloud without the sunshine and, what
is not less gracious, He will never send the
sunshine without the cloud.  When by day the
Israelites tramped the fiery desert He led them
by a pillar of cloud, and they marched in its
shade; and in the blackness of night He threw
in the sky a pillar of sunshine; and they
walked through the gloom in its light.

"In these terrible days of war when our
hearts begin to fail us and dark doubts cloud
the mind, let us look at the Covenant God
has made with us.  He has set it in rainbow
colors across the sky, that 'he who runs may
read' and 'the wayfaring man though a fool
may not err.'  God has flung his rainbow over
the trench and the grave; over the Garden of
Gethsemane; over the Cross on Calvary.  It
is over the tomb in the Arimathean's Garden;
and over Olivet, as Christ ascends to heaven.
We are born under the rainbow, live under it,
die under it.  At the last we shall find it over
the throne of Judgment.  Water and blood
flowed from Christ's side; and life and death,
joy and pain, light and darkness, summer and
winter, peace and war come forth from God.

"Let us take life as it comes with obedient
wills and grateful hearts.  The bee finds honey
in the thistle as well as in the rose, and 'where
the bee sucks there suck I,' for He who guides
the bee guides me.  Only in loving obedience
to God shall we find true wisdom.  It is not
so much what we are given as how we take
it that matters.  To be humble nothing may
be so sweet as sorrow; and to the proud nothing
may be so bitter as pleasure.  Let us leave
God to mix the ingredients of our life, for
'all things work together for good to them
that love God.'  It is all in the covenant
written by God's fingers in the colors of the
rainbow, and whenever He brings it from beyond
the clouds, let us look at it with reverent
eyes, and ponder its promise.  Then shall we
be able to say, with Wordsworth,

   |  'My heart leaps up when I behold
   |  A rainbow in the sky.'"
   |

After I had finished speaking we sang, at
the request of one of the sergeants, the hymn
commencing

   |  "The Day Thou gavest Lord is ended,
   |  The darkness falls at Thy behest."

And beautiful indeed was the singing of it.

The Benediction followed.  Just as I was
ending it an impulse came to me, and I yielded
to its importunity.  "Before we part and before
we leave Achicourt which has meant so much
to us of joy and sorrow," I said, "let us sing
a kiddies' hymn.  We still shelter in our hearts
a little child.  Though we have grown moustaches
and some of us gray hairs, the child
that we once were, never quite dies.  Let us
have a hymn for the boy within us who never
grows up and never dies."  Then I read out
verse by verse, for it was not in their books:

   |  "Now the day is over,
   |  Night is drawing nigh,
   |  Shadows of the evening
   |  Steal across the sky.

   |  "Jesus, give the weary
   |  Calm and sweet repose;
   |  With Thy tenderest blessing
   |  May their eyelids close.

   |  "Grant to little children
   |  Visions bright of Thee;
   |  Guarding the sailors tossing
   |  On the angry sea.

   |  "Comfort every sufferer
   |  Watching late in pain;
   |  Those who plan some evil
   |  From their sin restrain.

   |  "When the morning wakens,
   |  Then may I arise
   |  Pure and fresh, and sinless
   |  In Thy holy eyes."

I have witnessed many moving sights in my
time and heard much deep and thrilling music;
but I have never been so deeply moved by
anything as by the rich, deep voices of these
gallant men and boys who, after winning the
Battle of Arras, had come into this ruined
church and were singing this beautiful kiddies'
hymn as their last farewell.

The collection the boys had taken up had
been so heavy that we carried it to the French
lady's house for her.  As we entered her home
she said in her simple way, as her eyes grew
radiant with gratitude, "I like the English
soldiers."  It was the voice of France.  And
she was worthy to speak for France.  For
two-and-a-half years her house had stood
within a mile of the German trenches, and but
a few hundred yards from our own firing line.
Yet she and her mother had never left it.  She
introduced me to her mother, who had lived
in London, and spoke English.  Then she
brought in coffee.  I had noticed a most
remarkable thing about the house.  There was
not a piece of glass broken, nor a mark of
war on the walls.  It was the only house I
have seen, either in Achicourt or Arras, upon
which the war has not laid its monstrous and
bloody finger.  "How is it," I asked the
mother, "that your house has not been
touched?"  Her eyes shone and a sweet smile
lit up her face.  "It is the will of God," she
said simply.  "Shells have fallen a little short
of us and a little beyond us.  They have passed
within a yard of the house, and we have heard
the rushing of the wind as they passed, but
they have not touched us.  When the village
has been bombarded we have gone down into
the cellar as was but discretion and duty, but
we have had the conviction all along that we
should be spared, and we refused to leave the
house.  We do not know God's purpose but
we believe that it is God's will to spare us."  I
leave the fact to speak for itself and offer
no explanation.  Skeptics will say the house
was spared by accident; but they would not
have stayed there two-and-a-half years trusting
to such an accident.  These two women,
without a man in the house, stayed on the very
confines of hell with its hourly suspense and
danger for nearly three years, because they
believed it was God's will and that, though they
walked through the fiery furnace heated seven
times hotter than it was wont to be heated,
He would not allow so much as a hair of their
heads to be singed.  And not a hair was singed.
They were women in whom faith burned like
a bright pillar of fire.  One caught its light,
and felt its heat.  I have met patriots and
heroes and know their quality when I see them
and come near them.  These were "the real
thing."  Faith in God and faith in their
country were interwoven in their spirits like sun
and shower in a rainbow.  They were of the
same breed as the Maid of France, and like
her, with their white banner bearing the
device of the Cross, they withstood and defied
the might and terror of the invader.  They
believed it was God's will they should stay,
to "Be still and know that I am God."  Their
experience was expressed by the Psalmist
centuries ago: "God is our refuge and
strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be
removed, and though the mountains be carried
into the midst of the sea.  Though the waters
thereof roar and be troubled, though the
mountains shake with the swellings thereof
... Come behold the works of the Lord, what
desolations He hath made in the earth.  He
maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth;
He breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in
sunder; He burneth the chariot in the fire....
The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of
Jacob is our refuge."

Such was the faith of these two women, and
their courage few men have approached.  It
is a practical matter, and after comparing it
with the skeptic's theory of accident and
coincidence and remembering his probable haste in
seeking a place not so liable to untoward
accidents, I accept the explanation of the women.
Their house was spared and not a hair of
their heads injured because "it was God's will."  If
it is not the correct theory, it ought to be.
Otherwise falsehood is more sustaining than
truth, and inspires nobler conduct.

The day was now over.  A new chapter of
life had been written, and in the morning, we
left behind us this village of precious memories,
and marched out again into the unknown.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SONS OF THE MOTHERLAND`:

.. class:: center large bold

   VIII


.. class:: center large bold

   SONS OF THE MOTHERLAND

.. vspace:: 2

It is said that the eel is born in the deepest
part of the ocean, thousands of miles
from any country, and that, urged by an
overpowering instinct it begins almost at once
to rise towards the light and to head for the
land.  After slowly swimming thousands of
miles it reaches our rivers, and pushes its way
up to their sources, and even crawls through
the grass out of one stream into another.  Here,
if uncaught by man, it lives for years gorging
an appetite which only developed on reaching
the fresh water.  Then, the overmastering
instinct that brought it out, takes it back.  It
returns through the illimitable waters until it
finds the place where it was born.  There the
female lays her eggs and there male and female
die.  The eggs hatch, and the young do as
their parents did before them.

I do not think I could kill or eat an eel.
I have too much reverence for it now that
I have learned its story.  When in the fish
market I see an eel struggling, I feel that
I want to take it and drop it into the sea
that it may go to its long home "far from
the madding crowd's ignoble strife."  How
passionate and wild must be its desire to
get back to its own ocean depths where it
may perpetuate its kind and die in peace.
Its appetite is voracious, but then, what but
the mightiest and most elemental instincts and
appetites could carry it through achievements
so sublime and tragic.  Picture it on its lone
way through the deep, urged on by it knows
not what.  Scientists say that man has evolved
from a tiny form of life that passed through
the fish stage.  If so, it explains a lot and I,
for one, shall not be ashamed to acknowledge
relationship to a fish with a life story as
sublime as that of the eel.  I know that Genesis
speaks truly when it says that God made us
out of the dust of the earth and breathed into
our souls the breath of His own being thus
animating dust with divinity.  And if from the
other inspired book, the book of Nature,
scientists can teach how God mixed the clay when
He fashioned man I will accept the teaching
with gratitude, for it will help me to
understand things that are dark in me and in my
fellows.  It will throw light on the wild
longings, and instincts immature, that baffle the
mind, and come into the clear shallow streams
of life like eels out of the dark unfathomable
depths of the ocean.

Since I went to France I have been amazed
at the homing instinct as revealed in the
coming together of the sons of the British
Motherland.  People at home do not quite realize
what has happened.  Britain's sons have come
back to her--have come back to die that their
race may be saved and perpetuated.  The
British are a roving race.  A large number of
them yield to an overpowering desire to go
out into the world.  The South Pole and the
North Pole have known the tread of their feet.
Their ships have anchored in every creek of
every sea.  There is no town or country
however remote where their voices have not been
heard.  Even Mecca could not keep the Briton
out.  He must look upon its Black Stone.  All
lands call him to come, and see, and conquer.
He colonizes and absorbs but cannot be
absorbed.  He is a Briton still.  A friend of
mine told me that when visiting Australia
strangers who had never seen England, except
in and through their fathers, would come to
him in railway carriage or 'bus, and ask "How
is everything at *Home*?"  And Dr. Fitchett,
Australia's splendid author, confesses that when
he first saw the land of his fathers he knelt
down and kissed its shore.

Loving the homeland with a passion stronger
than death the Briton leaves it, for he hears
the call of the world borne on the winds and
waves from afar, and cannot refuse it.  In
foreign lands he lives and labors.  He roams
their fields and swims in their streams, but
always with an ear listening for the voice of the
Motherland; for he is hers, and at her service
if she calls.

The Declaration of War on Aug. 4, 1914,
was the Mother's call to her children.  Swifter
than lightning it passed through the waves and
on the wings of the wind.  The settler left his
lonely cabin, the gold-digger his shovel, the
prospector his surveying instruments, the
rancher his herds, the missionary his church,
the teacher his school, the clerk his office, and
all made for the nearest port.  Within a month
there was not a ship on the wide seas but was
bearing loyal sons back to their Motherland's
defense.  I have met, in France, British
soldiers from every country under heaven.  I
bent over a dying soldier near Arras who was
a clerk in Riga, Russia, when the call came.
And one night on the Somme a fine young
fellow from Africa entered my tent, and slept
by my side.  He was one of the most charming
and handsome men I have ever met, and had
come from Durban.  He had fought with
Botha in Southwest Africa, and at the
conclusion of that campaign had shipped for home.
Next day I took him to Delville Wood for he
wanted to see the place where his brother had
died.  I found that he was of my own
communion and we talked about some of my
college friends who had gone out to Natal.  Two
days later, he died of wounds in a dressing
station.  Most of the transport officers in our
Division have come home from abroad, and
have been given their posts because they are
accustomed to horses.  One was prospecting in
Nigeria, another salmon-canning in Siberia, a
third on a plantation in South America.

In addition to Canadians, South Africans,
Australians, and New Zealanders, who have
come by the hundred thousand at the call of
the Motherland, there are hundreds of thousands
who have come singly, or in small parties,
from remote corners of the earth.  For five
weeks I was a patient in a Canadian hospital
in France.  The entire staff was Canadian.
Some were Canadian born; others had gone out
to that country years ago.  All were of British
blood.  The colonel was a magnificent
specimen of manhood from London, Ontario, in
which city he had been born.  He would sit
on the bed and tell us tales of the great
snow-land.  Sometimes he would scold us for being
so blind to the greatness of the Empire and tell
us what Canada thought of the Motherland.
One of the night orderlies would, on occasion,
recite to us some poem such as "Jim Bludso,"
before the lights went out.  Then he would
come to my locker and take "Palgrave's
Treasury of Songs and Lyrics" with which to
regale his soul during the long watches of the
night.  He was of the full stature of men and
straight as a pine.  He had gone out from
Ireland as a boy, and settled on a cattle ranch
in the United States.  One day there was
trouble and one of the other cowboys sent a
bullet clean through his chest.  The moment
war was declared he left his roving herds of
cattle, crossed the frontier into Canada and
traveled hundreds of miles to Winnipeg to
enlist.  The doctor looked at him.  "What is
this scar on your chest?" he asked.  "Oh,"
replied the cowboy, "I fell off a wagon and
knocked the skin off."  The doctor turned him
round and put his finger in the scar on his
back where the bullet had passed out.  "And
what is this scar at the back?  Did you fall
off another wagon?"  And the two men understood
one another and laughed.  The doctor
could not find it in his heart to send the
cowboy back to his ranch, so he was passed into
the Canadian contingent.

One of the nurses we called "the Little
Mother."  She had gone to Canada five years
before, but the war had brought her back, and
well was it for us that it had.  Among the
patients was a doctor in the American A.M.C.
His ancestors had left England generations ago
and settled in New England, but he had come
back at the call of war--a grandson of the
Motherland.  Then there was a lieutenant of
British stock who had been born and brought
up at Antwerp, but as the German guns were
destroying his native city he took ship to enlist
in the British army.  "Anzac" was, as his
nickname denotes, an Australian.  He was in the
Flying Corps.  He had heard the call at school
and had come "home" to the land of his fathers.

In one regiment I found a bunch of lads who
had been born in China.  But, out there in
Hong Kong, they heard the call of a Motherland
they had never seen, and came post haste
to her help.  Sitting near me as I write, is an
officer back from the Argentine, and already, on
his arm, is a gold wound-stripe.  Another in the
mess had been pearl-fishing in Australia, but
stored his boats to come and fight.  Another
at our table was born in Australia.  He was
with Captain Falcon Scott on his last
expedition, and saw him go out to the South Pole
and death.  He has already been wounded.
When the war broke out its tumult seemed to
wake our fathers and we felt them stir in our
blood; for ancestors are not put into graves
but are buried alive in their sons.  We felt the
call to defend our race as our fathers did in
their day.  It was a master instinct, and the
millions of men who voluntarily left home and
business to fight show how deeply nationality
is rooted in human nature.  Returning from a
far land to die--if needs be--that their kind
may live, the scattered sons of our Motherland
have come by all the seas to defend her, in her
hour of need.

   |  "They came as the winds come
   |    When forests are rended;
   |  They came as the waves come
   |    When navies are stranded."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE TERROR BY NIGHT`:

.. class:: center large bold

   IX


.. class:: center large bold

   THE TERROR BY NIGHT

.. vspace:: 2

June was a flaming month on the high
ground we had captured beyond Arras.
The Quartermaster and Transport
Officer with whom I was messing were both "on
leave" so, as I was the only officer left in the
camp, a Baptist padre, whose regiment was
near, came to live with me.  I had a little brown
tent five feet wide and six feet long which a
rifleman had lent to me because the bell-tent
I was expecting had not arrived.  The
rifleman did not need his tent, for he and his
chums had built themselves a little dug-out.
Next day the bell-tent arrived, and the other
padre took possession of it, while I held on to
the little brown shelter.  Next to it was the
kitchen where the servants slept and cooked.
It was a truly wonderful contrivance of wood,
corrugated iron and ground-sheets.  The
Baptist chaplain's tent was round, my shelter
oblong, but what shape the kitchen was, would
pass the wit of man to say.  It was a shape
never seen on earth before.  It had no ancestor
and it could have no descendant.  Such a
design could not occur twice.  Beyond the kitchen
were the horse-lines of the regiment and close
by them the regimental stores.  It was so hot
that we all wore our lightest clothing; and
when the servants got lemons from Arras, the
lemonade they made lasted about five minutes
only, for what was left by us was quickly drunk
up by the servants with the assistance of those
who like to frequent such happy places as mess
kitchens.

All our meals were served out of doors,
under the blue sky.  We had guests most days,
for officers coming out from the homeland
stayed with us for a night or a day before
going up with the rations to join the regiment
in the trench.  Other officers had come down
to stay with us on their way to a course at some
military school; and one, at least, came to wait
for the day on which he was to take his "leave."  We
were, therefore, a very merry party.  It
was almost like camping on the Yorkshire
moors, for we had an uninterrupted view of
many miles.  To those who love vast stretches
of wild barren country as I do, the scene under
the flaming June sun was exceedingly impressive.
There were no houses, streams, hedges,
or trees, but the whole area was scored with
trenches cut into the white chalk, and showing
clearly at great distances.  The ground, with
but short spaces between, was covered with
encampments.  These consisted of the stores and
horse-lines of the regiments and batteries in
the line.  The circle of the horizon was bounded
by the charred ruins of French villages--Beaurains,
Neuville, Vitasse, Wancourt, Monchy
and Tilloy.  We could see the flashing of our
own guns, and the black bursts of shells from
those of the enemy.

All day the sky was thick with aeroplanes,
and many were too high to be seen except
through strong field glasses.  We watched a
German aeroplane circling over Arras and
directing the fire of the long guns.  Soon the
streets were strewn with dead and wounded,
for the town was full of troops.  The firing
only lasted a few minutes, however.  One of
our aeroplanes quickly challenged the enemy to
single combat; and we soon saw the German
machine falling from an immense height, wing
over wing and head over tail, utterly out of
control.

Dinner, in the cool of the evening, was a
most pleasant meal.  As we drank our coffee
we watched the aeroplanes returning from the
line like birds to their nests.  Sometimes we
counted as many as twenty, all heading for
home at the same time.  The sun set in red
and golden splendor, and we wondered what
darkness would bring.  On the night before
our arrival, the regiment which made way for
us had one of its storemen killed by a shell;
and on most nights a few shells fell in some
part or other of the vast camp.  One evening
shells fell a little beyond us and the
transport-sergeant moved his horse-lines.  After that,
he moved them every evening at dark, so that
the ground where the enemy had observed the
horses in the day-time was left vacant when
he opened fire at night.  It was a game of
chess with horses and men for pawns, and life
and death for the stakes.

On the evening before, our guest--a young
lieutenant--was to go on leave, he got very
uneasy.  As gulls scent the approach of stormy
weather and come inland, or blackbirds and
larks feel the approach of winter and migrate
to summer lands, so men can sometimes scent
danger and coming death.  He had with him a
bottle of whisky, and he kept it on the table
outside my tent--a safe place for it.

"I don't mind telling you, Padre," he said,
as he poured out a glass, "I've got the
'wind-up' badly to-night.  I don't like the feel of
things.  I would rather be in the trenches than
here, because I know what is likely to happen
there, but here in the open I feel strange and
unprotected.  I shall be glad when it is
morning."

His feeling was quite natural.  We always
feel another man's dangers more than our own
because they are new to us and we don't know
what to expect or how to meet them.  A man
will choose a big danger that he is used to,
sooner than a lesser danger that is new to
him.  Besides, the lieutenant had his
"leave-warrant" in his breast pocket and that will sap
any man's courage.  He has a feeling that the
shells are after his "leave-warrant" and that
the gunners know where it is.  He suspects that
fate is malignant and takes a special delight
in killing a man when he is on the way to
"Blighty."  Many a man has been killed with
a "leave-warrant" in his pocket, or "commission
papers" in it which were taking him home.

Our doctor told me how one night he and
the chaplain who preceded me were riding on
the front of an ambulance car when a shell
burst and with a fragment killed the chaplain.
In the padre's pocket was his warrant, and he
was taking his last ride before going home;
but instead of going home in "Blighty" he went
to his *long* home, and the warrant lies in the
grave with him.  A man feels particularly
vulnerable when the long-looked-for
"leave-warrant" is in his pocket.  He does not fear
death after "leave," but he does on the eve of
"leave."  He wants one more look at his home
and loved ones before going on the long and
lone journey which, despite all the comfort
which the Christian religion gives, still retains
much of its terror to the human spirit.  There
have been few better Christians than Samuel
Johnson and John Bunyan, but neither of them
could contemplate fording the river of death
without misgivings.  When they came to it they
found it much less formidable than they had
expected.  Had they been at the Front with
"leave-warrants" in their pockets to "Fleet
Street, London," or "Elstow, Bedford," I
fancy neither of them would have taken undue risks.

I could sympathize with the young lieutenant
for, a few months before, a "leave-warrant"
had made a bit of a coward of myself.  I was
in two minds whether or not to go up to the
firing line to see the men again before shipping
for home.  The "leave-warrant" was in my
pocket, and I was to go next morning; but the
doctor's story of my predecessor came to my
mind, and the "leave-warrant" spread itself out
before the eyes of my imagination.  I saw the
faces of my wife, and mother, and dog, and
the faces of my friends.  The old home and
the green fields stretched out before me; and
I decided to see them first and the "boys" after.
I had just been with my men, but it was a long
time since I had been with those at home.  If
there was a shell with my name and address
on it, I thought I would make the Hun wait
till I had been home, before I let him deliver
it into my hands.  I think a "leave-warrant"
would make a coward of any man.  At any
rate, the feeling is quite understood and
recognized by everyone at the Front; and this young
officer had been sent down from the trenches
to us, three days before his train was due to
start, so that he might have a better chance of
using his "warrant," and at the same time, feel
more at ease in mind.

I undressed and got into bed, and lay reading
by the light of a candle when the lieutenant
came to the tent door again.  "It's no use,
Padre," he said, "I can't go to bed yet.  I feel
too uneasy.  I wish I were on the train."  He
went back to the bell-tent he was sharing with
the other chaplain, and I put out my light.

There was the silence of a summer evening
broken only by the distant bursting of shells.
Then, suddenly, there was a crash about seventy
yards from our tents, and two more near the
horse-lines.  "To run or not run?" that was
the question; and my answer was in the
negative.  If I ran, it was just as likely that I
should run into a shell, as out of the way of
one.  On Easter Sunday I had seen three of
our non-commissioned officers killed in that
way.  Besides, I like my bed, once I have taken
the trouble to get into it.  I therefore put on
my steel helmet which I had placed by the
bed-side, and waited to see what would happen.
(A steel helmet is a wonderful comfort when
men are under fire.  We may not have much
in our heads but we feel more anxious about
them than about all the rest of the body.  The
helmets are heavy and uncomfortable and we
don't like wearing them, but, nevertheless, may
blessings ever rest on the head of the man
who invented them.  I have seen scores of lives
saved by them, and they have given infinite
comfort and assurance in trying moments.)

A long silence elapsed, then the lieutenant
appeared at the door of the tent again.

"You haven't been here all the time, have
you?" he asked.  "We went down to the old
trenches at the bottom of the camp; but it is
rather cold and wearisome there, and I think
the worst is over now.  I'm just going to take
another sip of the 'Scotch wine' and then turn
in for the night; but I'm not going to undress."

Ten minutes later there was a tremendous
crash as if a star had fallen on top of us.
There came a blinding flash of light, a strong
smell of powder, and a spluttering of bullets
on the ground.  That was enough to get the
laziest man living out of bed, and to answer
the question, "to run or not to run?" in the
affirmative.  I slipped on my boots without
fastening them, put on my trench coat and bade
my little tent a fond farewell.  There were
some old German gun-pits close by, and I
sought refuge there.  "Come in here, sir," cried
a voice, and I found myself by the side of a
sergeant.  Then the cook ran in bare-foot and
laughing.  No one seemed to have been hit, and
all had now sought shelter.  We waited for
some time and nothing further happened.  The
night was cold and I began to shiver in my
pajamas.  So I started to look about for a
place to sleep in, for a feeling of estrangement
had grown up between me and the little brown
tent.  There was a path across a shallow bit
of trench, and underneath it I found the barber,
lying comfortably on his bed.  He invited me
in, and said that I could have the bed, and
he would sleep at the side of it on his
ground-sheet.  He could, he said, sleep as soundly on
the ground as on the bed of stretched sacking.
I therefore returned to my tent to get blankets.
The time-fuse of a shell had gone through the
kitchen and rebounded from a beam on to my
servant, but without doing him any injury and
he proposed sleeping there for the night.  He
only agreed to move to some safer place, when
I ordered him to do so.  There was no one
in the bell-tent so I knew the occupants were
quite safe somewhere.  On striking a light to
get my blankets, I noticed three small holes
in the top of the tent, and knew that shrapnel
bullets had missed me only by inches.  It had
been a close shave and it was not inappropriate
that I was now going to be the guest of a
barber.

The psychological effect was not one I should
have expected.  The incident caused no
shell-shock, and but little immediate excitement; so
I was soon asleep.  All the others were in a
like case.  The excitement came with the
morning when we examined the tents and the
ground.  In the bell-tent there were ten
shrapnel bullet holes.  One had gone through the
piece of wood on which the officers' clothing
had been hung, and must have passed immediately
over the body of the Baptist chaplain as
he lay in bed.  Others must have passed equally
near the lieutenant who was not in bed, but,
standing up at the time, fully dressed.  In my
own little tent I found eleven holes and they
were in all parts of the canvas.  Some of the
bullets must have gone in at one side and out
at the other, for only five were found
embedded in the hard, chalky ground.  A sixth
had passed through the box at the bed-head
and entered deeply into the book I had been
reading.  Outside the kitchen, the servants
picked up a lump of shell a foot long and
three or four inches wide.  Well was it for
them that the fragment fell outside the kitchen
and not inside.  The ground around the tents
was sprinkled with shrapnel bullets and bits of
shell.  The shells which fell near the horses
had burst on touching the ground, and not like
ours, in the air.  They had dug deep holes in
the earth, and as the horses were within a few
yards of them, it seemed miraculous that none
was hurt.  The transport had just returned
from taking up the rations, and, as one of the
drivers leapt off his horse, a bullet hit the
saddle where his leg had been a second before.
Not a man or horse received a scratch, although
the shells had made a direct hit on our camp.
On other occasions one shell has laid out scores
of men and horses.

They say that sailors don't like padres on
board ship, because they think the latter bring
them bad luck.  And most people are a little
afraid of the figure thirteen, but though it was
the thirteenth of June and there were two
padres in the tents, we had the best of what
is called "luck."  So I think we may say it was
one up for the padres.  After breakfast we
gathered together some of the fragments lying
around the tents, and found the nose-cap of a
shell which had burst seventy yards away.
With these, and the time-fuse which hit my
servant, the other chaplain and I went to a
battery and asked the officers to tell us
something about the gun, just as one might take a
bone of some extinct creature to a scientist,
and ask him to draw an outline of the whole
animal.  They told us that the gun was a
long-range, high-velocity, naval gun with a possible
range of fifteen miles.  They knew where it
was, but could not hit it.  The shot was a
large high-explosive, shrapnel shell, and the
time-fuse indicated that it had come to us from
about eleven miles away.

On our return we built ourselves dug-outs
for the nights, and only lived in the tents by
day.  Sometimes we were shelled in the
day-time, but by taking cover took no hurt, though
a lad in the transport next to us was
seriously wounded.  When they were shelling us
by day, we could distinctly hear the report
of the gun, a second or two later, see the shell
burst in the air; and a second later still, we
could hear it.  We saw the burst before we
heard it.

I have given this personal incident not, I
hope, out of any impulse of egotism, but
because it furnishes those who have not been at
the Front with an idea of the terror which
assails our men by night, both in the trenches
and in the "back areas."  There can be but
few who, having been any length of time at
the Front, have not had similar experiences
and equally narrow escapes.  They are so
common that men get used to them and do not
take nearly enough care to protect themselves.
Loss by such stray shells is expected, and the
soldiers regard it much as a tradesman regards
the deterioration of his stock.  One gets used
to the frequent occurrence of death as he does
to anything else.  At home there are thousands
of preventable deaths--deaths through street
accidents, diseases and underfeeding.  The
number could be enormously reduced if the
nation would rouse itself.  And human nature
is much the same at the Front.  Men prefer
ease and comfort to safety.  Also, men grow
fatalistic.  They have seen men sought out by
shells after they have taken every precaution
to escape them; and they have seen others go
untouched when they seemed to be inviting
shells to destroy them.  Men are conscious of
a Power that is not themselves directing their
lives.  They feel that in life which the Greek
tragedians called Fate.  They do not know
quite what to call it.  Most of them would call
it Providence if they spoke frankly and gave
it a name at all.  One of the finest Christian
officers I know told me that he believed that
God's finger had already written what his fate
should be.  If he had to die nothing could save
him, and if he had to live, nothing could kill
him.  All he was concerned with was to be able
to do his duty, and take whatever God sent
him.  This, he said, was the only suitable
working philosophy for a man at the Front.

There is a widespread fatalism at the Front,
but it is the fatalism of Christ rather than of
old Omar Khayyam: "Take no thought for
your life ... for your heavenly Father
knoweth that ye have need of all these things, but
seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his
righteousness.  Take therefore no thought for
the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought
for the things of itself.  Sufficient unto the day
is the evil thereof."  And this works.  It
enables men to "put a cheerful courage on"
and do their duty.  There is none of the
paralysis of will and cessation of effort which
follows the fatalistic philosophy of the East.
All that Omar Khayyam's fatalism leaves a
man to strive after is "Red, Red Wine," in
which he drowns memory, honor and reputation
and character.  When he has passed from
among his peers, there is nothing left to
remember him by but a "turned-down empty
glass."  The Christian fatalism at the Front
destroys no man's initiative, but keeps him
merry and bright, and helps him to "do his
bit."  When he shall pass from the
banqueting-house of life, into the Great Unexplored,
he will leave as his memorial, not a turned-down
glass, but a world redeemed from tyranny
and wrong.





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.. _`"ETON BOYS NEVER DUCK!"`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \X

.. class:: center large bold

   "ETON BOYS NEVER DUCK!"

.. vspace:: 2

An army is more courageous than the
individuals who compose it.  The coward
finds sufficient courage for his job
while doing it with his regiment, and the brave
is at his bravest.  He has a courage which is
not his own but which, somehow, he puts on
with his uniform.  He does deeds of daring
he could not have done as a civilian.  The
army has a corporate courage and each soldier
receives a portion of it just as he receives a
ration of the army's food.  It is added to what
he has of his own.

The badge of the army is courage.  When
a recruit joins the army he knows that he is
putting away the civilian standard of courage
with his derby hat, and is putting on the
soldier's standard of courage with his uniform.
His great fear is that he will not be able to
live up to it.  He wonders if he is made of
the stuff that produces heroes.  He is a mystery
to himself and has a haunting fear that there
may be a strain of the coward in his make-up.
He wishes it were possible to have a rehearsal
for he would rather die than fail on the
appointed day.

The chaplain fears that he will faint and
become a hindrance instead of a help when he
first sees blood and torn limbs in the dressing
station; and the recruit is afraid of being afraid
in the hour of battle and of bringing dishonor
and weakness upon his regiment.  He will be
glad when the trial is over--when he knows
the stuff of which nature has made him.  A
friend of mine told me one day that he was
walking over a heavily shelled field with a
young aristocrat of a highly strung
temperament.  The man was afraid, but would not
yield to his fear.  His lips twitched and his
face became drawn and white.  His movements
were jerky but he made no other sign.  He
talked about paltry things in which, at the
moment, he had not the slightest interest, and
passed jocular or sardonic remarks about the
things that were happening around them.  My
friend ducked his head when a shell burst near
as we all have done often enough, but the
young aristocrat kept his head as high and stiff
as if he were being crowned.  He held it up
defiantly; was it not filled with the bluest
blood of England?  The shells might blow it
off if they liked.  That was their concern, not
his, but they should never make him bow.  His
fathers had fought on British battlefields for
centuries, and had never bowed their heads to
a foe, and he would not break the great
tradition.  Shells might break his neck but they
should never bend it.  He would face the
enemy with as stiff an upper-lip and as stiff a
neck as ever his fathers did.  He knew his
personal weakness and reinforced his strength
with that of his fathers'.  He was not afraid
of death.  He was afraid of being afraid.

My friend was a coachman's son who by
courage and capacity of the highest order had
won a commission.  He had no traditions
either to haunt or help him, and he had often
been tried in the fire and knew his strength.  He
was not afraid of being afraid.  It was natural
to duck when a shell burst near and it did
him no harm and made no difference to the
performance of his duties; so he ducked as he
felt inclined, and then laughed at his nerves
for the tricks they were allowing the shells to
play on them.  But, knowing his companion's
more sensitive nature and temperamental
weakness, he was immensely impressed by his stiff
neck and proudly erect head.  He showed a
self-control which only centuries of breeding
could give.  Here was a hero indeed.  The
shells he was defying were as nothing to the
fears which haunted his imaginative nature and
which, with his back to the wall of his family
traditions, he was fighting and keeping at bay.
My friend could not refrain from complimenting
him on resisting the natural tendency
to duck the head when a shell screamed above
them.

"Eton boys never duck," replied the young
aristocrat.

He was an Eton boy and would die rather
than fall short of the Eton standard.  In this
war hundreds of them have died rather than
save themselves by something which did not
measure up to the Eton standard.  The ranks
of young British aristocrats have been terribly
thinned in this war and I have heard their
deeds spoken of with a reverence such as is
only given to legendary heroes.  They have
gone sauntering over the crater-fields to their
deaths with the same self-mastery and outward
calm which the French aristocracy manifested
as they mounted the steps of the guillotine in
the Reign of Terror.  To their own personal
courage was added the courage of their race,
and the accumulation of the centuries.

We speak of our new armies.  There can be
no "new" armies of Britons.  The tradition
of our newest army goes back to Boadicea.
Its forerunners, without shields or armor, and
almost without weapons, dared the Romans--the
proud conquerors of the world--to battle;
and gave them the longest odds warriors ever
gave.  They knew they could not win but they
knew they could die.  Dead warriors they
might become but never living slaves.  They
ran up Boadicea's proud banner because they
knew that while the Romans might soak it in
British blood, no power on earth could drag
it through the mire.

Our forefathers crossed swords with Cæsar
and his Roman legions, and our newest army
goes into battle with the prestige born of two
thousand years of war.  They have a morale
that belongs to the race in addition to the
morale they possess as individuals.  It is said
that "the British do not know when they are
beaten."  How should they know?  They have
had no teachers.  All they know is that if they
have not gained the victory the battle is not
ended and must go on until they pitch their
tents on the undisputed field.  The German
Emperor spreads out his War Map but it
is as undecipherable as the mountains in the
moon to our soldiers.  Tyrants have never
found them apt scholars at geography.  They
prefer to make their own maps even though
they have no paint to color them with except
the red blood in their veins.  The Kaiser may
roll up his War Map of Europe; our soldiers
have no use for it, and will not commit to
memory its new boundaries.  They feel in their
souls the capacity to make a new one more in
line with their ideas of fair play.

"Eton boys never duck."  If the muscles of
their necks show a tendency to relax they call
to mind how inflexible their fathers have stood
in bygone days, and their necks become stiff
and taut once more.  Wellington said that
Waterloo was won on the playing fields of
Eton.  It is still true that "Eton boys never
duck" to the foe; nor do the soldiers they lead.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`"MISSING"`:

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   XI


.. class:: center large bold

   "MISSING"

.. vspace:: 2

The word "Missing" has come to exercise
an even more terrible power over
the human heart than the word "Death."  The
latter kills the heart's joy and hope with
a sharp clean cut, but "Missing" is a clumsy
stroke from the executioner's axe.  In a few
cases the wounded victim is spared and allowed
to recover, but in the majority of cases there
is no reprieve and a second blow is struck after
a period of suspense and suffering.  A chaplain
dreads the word.  As he opens his
correspondence after a battle, it fixes him as the
glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner fastened
the wedding guest.  It leaps from the page
at him with the malignant suddenness of a
serpent.  Wounds and death he can explain to
relatives, but "missing" is beyond explanation.
No one who has not been at the Front can
conceive how a lad can disappear and no one
see what becomes him.  A man may read
graphic accounts of conditions of life in the
battle-line, but it is beyond his imagination to
visualize it with any real approach to truth.

After the first day of the Somme Campaign
we had hundreds of casualties and most of
them were classed as "Missing."  The soldiers
went "over the top" and did not return, and
no one knew why.  They were simply
"missing."  Why did no one know their fate?  It
came about in this way.  The men scrambled
over the parapet and, forming in line, charged
across No Man's Land in extended order.
Some fell immediately.  The wounded among
them got back to the dressing station, and the
bodies of the dead were found within a few
days, at least.  So far, there are no "Missing."  The
rest of the men press on, some falling
at every step; the line thins, and the men get
separated.  When a man falls his neighbor
cannot stay with him.  He must press on to the
objective, otherwise, if the unwounded stayed
to succor the wounded, there would be none
to continue the attack; and under the hail of
shells and bullets sweeping the open ground,
everyone would perish.  The only way to
succor the wounded is to press on, capture the
enemy trench, and stop the rifle and machine-gun
fire.  Consequently, the man who presses
on does not, as a rule, know whether his
comrade fell dead, was wounded, or merely took
cover in a shell hole.  And even though he
were to know, he may be killed himself later,
and his knowledge die with him.

If the attack succeeds, and the German trench
is held by us, No Man's Land can be
searched.  The wounded and dead are found,
and but few are reported "missing."  But if
the attack fail, and the regiment has to retire
to its own line, it becomes impossible for us
to search that part of No Man's Land, adjoining
the German trench (for there is rarely
any truce after a battle in this war), and so,
it is impossible to find out whether those who
have failed to return were killed, wounded, or
taken prisoners.  The comrades who saw them
fall are probably killed, for the return is as
fatal as the attack.  If they come back wounded
they are taken straight to the hospitals and so
have no chance of reporting to their officers
the fate of those whom they saw fall.  Only
the unwounded return to the regiment and, in
a lost battle, these are few and know but little
of what happened to those around them.  They
were excited and were fighting for their lives.
They had no leisure to observe the fate of
others.

On one occasion our men took some German
trenches opposite them and held them for
some hours by desperate fighting, but before
dusk had to retire.  Many were left dead or
wounded in the captured trenches, and many
fell on the return journey.  The few who got
back to us unwounded could give very little
information about individuals who were
missing.  They had been separated one from
another and fighting hour after hour with
desperation.  All therefore who did not return
to the regiment or dressing station, and whose
bodies were not recovered, were reported as
"Missing" unless declared dead by reliable
eye-witnesses.  The evidence of eye-witnesses
must be carefully examined before a regiment
dare report a soldier dead on the strength of
it.  During an attack a man is in an abnormal
state of excitement and the observations of
his senses are not entirely reliable.  Men
imagine they see things, and frequently make
mistakes in identity.  I have known many cases
in which a man has sworn that he saw another
being carried to the dressing station, yet the
missing man's body has afterwards been found
near the German lines.  The eye-witness
simply mistook one man for another.  No end
of pain to relatives has been caused by these
mistakes and a regiment rightly declines on
such evidence to report a soldier as killed.

Some weeks after the attack just referred to,
we received letters from some of the officers
and men who had been taken prisoners;
information about others came through The
Geneva Red Cross Society.  Those of whom
we heard nothing for six months we knew to
be, in all probability, dead.  Nine months later,
the Germans retired from the position, and
many of our dead were found still lying out
in No Man's Land.  Some were identified.
Others could not be, their discs having
perished by reason of the long exposure.  Many
of the dead had been left in the German
trenches.  These had been buried by the enemy
and he had left no crosses to mark the graves.
After more than a year there is no direct
evidence of the death of many who fought
on that day.  They are "Missing," and we can
only conclude that they were killed.

In other cases, men are reported missing for
several weeks, and then reported dead.  A
typical case may be cited to show how it comes
about.  We attacked one morning at dawn.
The enemy were on the run, and in a state of
exhaustion.  An immediate attack would, it
was believed, carry the position without much
loss of life, even though our big guns had not
had time to come up in support.  Unfortunately
the Germans were, unknown to us, reinforced
during the night.  Their new troops met our
men with a hail of rifle and machine-gun fire,
and the regiment was ordered to retire.
Several failed to return.  We knew that some
of the men had been forced to surrender,
especially the wounded.  Others had been
killed.  Those who returned unwounded were
not able, however, to give us the names of
those who had been killed or of those who had
been taken prisoners.  The attack had been
made in the half-light of dawn so that our men
could not be seen distinctly.  They had also
advanced in extended order so as to avoid
making themselves an easy target.  The
half-light and the distance of one man from another
made it difficult, therefore, for anyone to see
either who fell or why they fell.  Most of
those who were killed or taken prisoners were
therefore reported as "missing."

A few days later the whole Division was
moved to another part of the Front.  A fresh
regiment took our place, and, a few weeks
later, with adequate artillery support, carried
the German trenches.  After the battle, burial
parties were sent out by the regiment to bury
both its own dead and ours who had been left
in the German half of No Man's Land.
Each grave was marked with the soldier's
name, and his disc and paybook were sent to
our regiment as proof of his death.  The War
Office was then informed that such and such a
man "previously reported missing, is now
reported killed."

There are, however, cases of missing men
which cannot be explained.  The facts never
come to light, and we can only guess what
happened.  They may have been buried by the
enemy, or they may have been buried in the
dark by some regimental burial party which
could not find their discs.  They may even have
been buried by a shell or blown to fragments
by a direct hit.  We have no evidence.

After the attack on Gommécourt a youth I
knew had his wound dressed at the Regimental
Aid post and was seen, by more than one of
his chums, passing down the communication
trench to the Advanced Dressing Station where
I happened to be.  Yet he never arrived, slight
though his wound was.  It was impossible for
him to have got lost.  His brother and I made
every possible enquiry about him, but nothing
ever came to light, and we both came to the
conclusion that on his way down the trench
he had been buried by a shell.  In another
case an officer was wounded and four stretcher
bearers went out to bring him in.  None were
ever seen again, and later, when we came into
possession of the ground, the body of none
of them were found.  It was scarcely possible
for them to have been taken prisoners, and
they were never reported as having been
captured.  We concluded, therefore, that a shell
had both killed and buried them.

One day a rifleman reported sick to the
Doctor and was sent down the line to the
Dressing Station whence he would be sent on
to a Rest Camp.  He was not seriously ill,
and needed no escort.  It was impossible for
him to have wandered into the German lines,
yet he never reported at the Dressing Station
or anywhere else.  Loss of memory is very
rare, but even if that had happened to him,
he could not have wandered about behind our
lines without being found and arrested.  No
report of his burial ever reached us and we
were led to the conclusion that he was killed
by a shell on the way down, and in such a way
that all means of identification were lost.  In
another case a private, wounded in the arm,
was sent down the line in company with a
party of stretcher bearers who were carrying
a "lying case."  Evidently he got separated
from them in the dark, and was hit by a shell,
for he never reached any dressing station, and
his fate was never known.

Conditions at the front are such that these
mysterious disappearances must inevitably
occur.  Every possible arrangement which
circumstances will allow is made to prevent them;
but they cannot be altogether eliminated.
People at home may sometimes think that more
might have been done, but it is because they
have no conception of the amazing conditions
under which the war is carried on.  Every
officer and private knows that he may
disappear without leaving a trace.  That being so,
they, if only from common prudence and the
instinct of self-preservation, combine to reduce
the danger to its lowest limits; but, when all
has been done, war is war; and nothing can
rob it of its horrors.

Every day, officers and men die in trying to
save their comrades, and nothing could be more
unjust than to blame those who survive for
not having done more to prevent others from
being lost; for those who are surviving, to-day,
may become missing to-morrow, and leave no
trace behind.  Officers have sometimes shown
me letters from poor distracted relatives which
could never have been written if they could
have imagined the deadly peril in which the
officers stood and the manifold distractions
that wore them down.  Sometimes an officer's
letter is short and business-like in reply to an
enquiry, but it must be remembered that his
first duty is to the living.  He must hold the
line and save his men; and he has, despite the
tragedy of his position, to answer not one
enquiry but scores.  And before he has finished
answering all the enquiries, his own parents,
perhaps, will be making enquiries about his
own fate.  Our officers are the bravest and
kindest-hearted men that ever had the lives of
others in their keeping; and when the chaplain
asks them for details about any missing or slain
soldier, they will go to endless trouble for him.
They know what their own death will mean
to their parents; and the knowledge makes their
hearts go out in sympathy to the parents of
their men, and it makes them do all that is
possible to prevent lives being lost.

When Moses died no man knew the place
of his burial.  It has not been found to this
day.  We know nothing of his last thoughts
or of the manner of his death.  His end is a
perfect mystery.  But we know that he died in
the presence of God; that God strengthened
him in the dread hour; and that with His own
fingers He closed the lids over the prophet's
brave, tender eyes.  God buried Moses in a
grave dug by His own hands and He will know
where to find the poor worn-out body of the
great patriot at the resurrection of the just.
And God was with every one of our missing
lads to the last, and He knows the narrow bed
in which each lies sleeping.  The grave may
have no cross above it, but it will often know
the tread of an angel's feet as he comes to
plant poppies, primroses and daffodils above
the resting-place of the brave.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`"IT MUST BE SUNDAY"`:

.. class:: center large bold

   XII


.. class:: center large bold

   "IT MUST BE SUNDAY"

.. vspace:: 2

The Psalmist of Israel tells us that God
has "ordained" the moon and the stars.
These "flaming fires" are "ministers of
His that do His pleasure."  Nor are they
the only ones chosen from Nature.  Mungo
Park, having laid down in the desert to die,
notices beside him a tiny flower, and it awakens
hope in him.  The winter of his despair is
ended.  He rises again, and pushes on until
he finds a human habitation where he is cared
for by native women as though he were their
brother.  The little flower had been "ordained"
to minister hope to a lost and despairing traveler.

At the Front such ministering by Nature is
of common occurrence.  No Man's Land is
desolate enough to look upon, but there is life
there, and music.  Larks have chosen it for
their nests, and amid its desolation they rear
their young.  Even the pheasants have taken
to some parts of it.  If we could but know
the thoughts of the wounded who have lain
out there waiting for death, we should find
that the moon and the stars, the birds and the
field mice, had not allowed them die without
some comforting of the spirit.

One Sunday our regiment was resting in
reserve trenches after a period in the firing line.
It was a beautiful evening, and as the sun
sank westward I administered the Sacrament
of the Lord's Supper.  The day was far spent
but, as the bread was broken, there came to
us a vision of the Face which the two disciples
saw on another such evening in the far-off
village of Emmaus.  On the way back to my
billet I met a platoon of Royal Engineers
returning from the baths.  One of them had
been a member of my church in London, and
he dropped out to talk with me.  Those who
have not been in the Expeditionary Force can
hardly understand the pleasure a man feels
when he meets someone he knew in the days of
peace, or even someone who knows the street
or town out of which he came.  He was full
of talk, and as I listened his excitement and
pleasure bubbled over like a spring.

"Last night," he said, "was the night of
my life.  I never expected to see daylight
again.  Talk about a 'tight corner,' there was
never one to match it, and as you know, my
chums and I have been in many.  The Huns
simply plastered us with shells.  The
bombardment was terrific.  It was like being in a
hailstorm and we expected every moment to be
our last.

"You know the trench which the infantry
took yesterday?  Well, we were there.  We
went up at dark to fix barbed wire in front of
it ready for the counter-attack.  We were out
in No Man's Land for about two hours,
working as swiftly and silently as we could.
Whenever the enemy sent his lights up, we laid down,
and so far we had escaped notice and were
congratulating ourselves that the work was
nearly done, and that our skins were still
whole.  Then, somehow, the Germans spotted
us, and let fly.  It was like hell let loose.  We
ran to the trench for shelter, but it seemed as
if nothing could save us from such a deluge
of shells.  It was just like being naked in a
driving snow-storm.  We felt as if there was
no trench at all, and as if the gunners could
see us in the dark.  After that experience I
can pity a hare with a pack of hounds after
it.  But we just sat tight with such cover as
we had and made the best of it.  There was
nothing else to do.  If we were to be killed,
we should be killed.  Nothing that we could
do would have made any difference.  Yet,
though there didn't seem shelter for even a
mouse, only one of us was hit, and that was
the sergeant.  He was rather badly 'done in,'
and we could only save his life by getting him
quickly to the dressing station.

.. figure:: images/img-144.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "HE WAS RATHER BADLY DONE IN" Drawn by F. Matahia for The Sphere, London

   "HE WAS RATHER BADLY DONE IN" 
   *Drawn by F. Matahia for The Sphere, London*

"I am one of the taller and stronger men
of my platoon so, of course, I volunteered as
a stretcher-bearer.  There was no communication
trench, so we had no choice but to lift
him up and make a dash across the open.
They were shelling us like blazes, but we dare
not delay because, if we were overtaken by
daylight, it would be impossible to get him
away till the next night, and by that time he
would be dead.  So we decided to try our luck.
We had just lifted him up when a shell burst
right on top of us, and knocked us all down.
For a minute or two I was unconscious, and
when I came round I thought I must surely
be wounded, so I ran my fingers over my body
but found neither blood nor a rent in my
clothes.  I was covered with chalk but that
didn't matter.  Except for a touch of
concussion in the brain I was none the worse, and
soon pulled myself together.  The sergeant
was a sight!  He was half-buried, and we
could scarce see him for chalk; but we dug
him out and got him on the stretcher again.
After that we sat down in the bottom of the
trench till the effect of the shock had worn
off a bit, for we all felt like rats that had been
shaken by a terrier.

"Then, as suddenly as it had started, the
shelling stopped.  The calm that followed was
wonderful.  I never felt anything so restful
before.  It was like the delicious restfulness that,
sometimes, immediately follows hours of fever.
Then, as if to make it perfect, a lark rose out
of No Man's Land and began to sing.  The
effect on us was magical.  It was the sweetest
music I have ever heard, and I shall remember
it to my dying day.  The countryside was dark
and silent, and, as I listened to the lark, old
days came back to mind.  You remember that
Saturday midnight in the June before the war
when you took us into Epping Forest to see
the dawn break over it?  Well, as I listened
to the lark, I was back there in the forest.
Then some impulse seized me and, hardly
knowing what I did, I cried aloud, 'Why bless
me, it must be Sunday,' and so it was, although
I had forgotten.

"Then we jumped up for we saw that the
dawn was breaking and, lifting the sergeant
out of the trench, we rushed across the open
ground in the direction of the dressing station.
Talk about 'feeling protected!'  Why, I felt
that God was all around us--that no harm
could touch us.  A great calm stole over me,
and I felt utterly devoid of fear.  We had,
as you know, to bring the sergeant some two
miles to the dressing station, just down the
road there, but we got him safely in, and I
think he will get better."

While we were talking, a shell burst near
the trench where my men had been taking of
the Sacrament, and another burst by the
roadside close to the Engineers.  With a laugh
and a hearty "Good-night" he shook hands,
saluted, and ran on to rejoin his comrades.
The shells were part of the game.  In London
we had been in the same football team.  He
had kept goal and I had played full back, and
he regarded the shells that had fallen as bad
shots at goal made by the opposing team.
They might have been serious but, as it
happened, the ball had each time gone out of play.

I waited a minute or two in the hope of
getting a lift.  A motor car came along; I
stopped it and got in; for at the Front
everything is Government property and more or
less at one's service.  I found myself sitting
by the side of a private, who had been wounded
in the face and right hand by the shell that
had just fallen near the platoon of Engineers.

He had left his horse with a comrade, and
was being driven to the Advanced Dressing
Station by a driver who, happening to pass at
the moment, had kindly offered him a lift.
After a little wait at the Dressing Station I
got on the front of an ambulance car.  There
were only two cases inside, and they were being
taken to the Main Dressing Station in Arras.
One of them had his feet and arms tied to
the stretcher, for he was suffering from
shell-shock; and three orderlies were in charge of
him.  The poor fellow laughed and cried
alternately and struggled to break loose.  "I'm
a British soldier," he cried, "and I will not
be tied up.  I've done my bit, and this is the
way you pay me out.  I'll not have it."  And
time and again he struggled desperately to
break away.

The orderlies in charge of him were wise and
tactful as women.  They asked him questions
about the fight, and he fought his battle over
again.  They praised his regiment and told him
it had done magnificently, and he laughed and
chuckled like a young mother, dandling her
first baby on her knee.  And so, without
mishap, we reached the ruined town of Arras
where nightly the shells fall among the forsaken
houses in which our soldiers are billeted.
The wounded private was carried into the
hospital, and I walked away to my room in an
adjoining street.

So ended the day which, in the hour of
dawn, the dark had told the young engineer
"must be Sunday."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`OUR TOMMIES NEVER FAIL US`:

.. class:: center large bold

   XIII


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   OUR TOMMIES NEVER FAIL US

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On Easter Monday, in the Battle of
Arras, I saw two sights such as I shall
never forget.  One revealed the kind
and forgiving spirit of our men, the other their
unflinching courage.  After burying three
non-commissioned officers who had been killed the
day before, I reached the Advanced Dressing
Station near which our regiment was "standing
to" in a support trench.  Other regiments of
our Division were carrying out the attack and,
with small loss, had taken the enemy lines.
The German trenches had been blotted out by
our shells but their deep dug-outs, with
machine-guns at their mouths, remained
untouched, and it was almost impossible for our
soldiers to discover them until they got within
a few yards of the entrances.

The German commander's idea was to keep
his men in the shelter of the dug-outs until
our barrage lifted.  They were then to rush
out with machine-guns and rifles to destroy our
men who were following it up.  If the idea
had been carried out, the German line would
have been impregnable for our men would
have been mown down like corn before the
reaper.  It failed because German human
nature could not rise to the occasion.  The
German soldiers had been demoralized by the
safety of the dug-outs and by the thunder of
our shells above them.  They cowered in the
dug-outs when they should have rushed out.
The critical moment passed, and with its
passing our soldiers leapt to the entrances and
threw down hand grenades.  There was a wild
cry of pain and fear from below.  Arms went
up and the cry of "Kamerad."  The surrender
was accepted and the beaten soldiers
crawled out.  From some dug-outs as many as
two hundred prisoners were taken.  In other
parts of the line there was a stiff fight, but, on
the whole, our casualties were very light.
From my own observation I should say that
we took more prisoners than we suffered
casualties.  Some companies could boast a prisoner
for each man engaged in the attack.

The Advanced Dressing Station was at the
corner of Cross Roads and the sight around
it was wonderful to behold.  A crowd of
prisoners was assembling ready to be marched
to the cages, and wounded officers and men,
British and German, were being bandaged.
The prisoners were hungry.  For some days
our artillery had cut off their rations.  A
platoon of our soldiers came marching by, and,
to save time, eating their breakfasts as they
passed along.  The prisoners looked at them
with hungry eyes.  Our men saw the look and
stopped.  Breaking rank for a moment they
passed in and out among the prisoners and
shared out their rations.  "Here, Fritzy, old
boy, take this," I heard all around me, and
Fritz did not need asking twice.  He took the
biscuits and cheese gratefully and eagerly.
The look of trouble passed out of his eyes and
he felt that he had found friends where he
had only expected to find enemies.  He began
to hope for kindness in his captivity.  The
scene was one of pure goodwill.

Scarcely ever have I seen a crowd so happy.
Our Tommies laughed and cracked jokes which
no German could understand, but I heard not
a single taunt or bitter word.  In fact, Fritz
was treated more like a pet than a prisoner.
One who had worked in London, and who
spoke English, asked me for a cup of tea for
a comrade who was slightly wounded, and I
got one in the dressing station.  The platoon
of Tommies re-formed and marched away to
the battle and the prisoners were led off to
the cages.  There were still large numbers of
prisoners on the road, and they were moving
about without guards.  Many of them were
being used as stretcher-bearers and they seemed
to do their work out of goodwill and not of
constraint.

Their assistance was of great help to the
wounded.  The battle was going well with us.
Everyone felt in good heart and kindly
disposed.  An officer who lay seriously wounded
and waiting for a car told me of the splendid
work which his regiment had done.  His eyes
shone with suppressed excitement and pride as
he told the story.  While he was speaking two
soldiers came limping down the road and their
appearance was greeted with a burst of
laughter.  One was English, the other German.
Tommy had his arm round the German's neck
and was leaning on him while Fritz, with his
arm round the lad's waist, helped him along.
They came along very slowly for both were
wounded, but they laughed and talked together
like long-lost brothers.  Yet neither could
understand a word the other said.

I passed down the road towards the line.
Gunners of the Territorials were hurriedly
hitching their guns to the horses ready to
advance to new positions.  In the ruined village
a party of engineers was already unloading a
wagon of rails with which to build a light
railway.  I continued along the road towards the
next village.  It had just fallen into our hands
and not one stone was left on another.  There
were scores of wounded men hobbling back
from it and I gave my arm to such as needed
it most.  A badly wounded Tommy was being
brought along on a wheeler by two orderlies
and as I helped them through the traffic we
heard the heavy rumble of the advancing field-guns.

The road was cleared with the quickness of
lightning.  Out of the village the batteries burst
at a mad gallop and down the road they came
at break-neck speed.  With the swiftness of
a fire engine in a city street the rocking guns
swept past.  The gunners clung to the
ammunition limbers with both hands and the
drivers whipped and spurred the excited
foam-flecked horses as though they were fiery beings
leaping through the air and incapable of fatigue
or weakness.  Suddenly the drivers raised their
whips as a sign to those behind, and the
trembling horses and bounding guns came to a
dead halt.  The leading gun had overturned at
a nasty place where the road dipped down into
the hollow.  The rest of the batteries stood
exposed on the crest of the ridge.  Before
retiring the Germans had felled all the trees that
grew by the roadside so that nothing might
obstruct their line of vision.  Such a
catastrophe as this was what the enemy had been
hoping for.  The sun shone brilliantly, and
our batteries were a direct target for the
German gunners such as seldom occurs.  Our boys
were caught like rats in a trap.  By the side
of the road ran a shallow trench and near us
two broad steps into it.  We laid the wounded
lad in the bottom of the trench and sat down
by his side.  Shells were falling all around and
fountains of dirt and debris rose into the air
and, on five or six occasions, covered us with
their spray.

I covered the lad's face.  He was barely
conscious and uttered no word.  It seemed as if
nothing could live in such a bombardment.  A
shell burst near, and the cry of dying horses
rent the air.  The traces were cut and the
horses and gun-carriage drawn off the road.
Every second I expected to see the horses and
drivers in front of me blown into the air and
I watched them with fascinated eyes.  Not a
man stirred.  They sat on their horses and
gun-carriages as though they were figures in bronze.
Not a man sought the trench and not a man
relieved the tension by going forward to see
what was wrong or to lend a hand.  Each
knew his place, and if death sought him it
would know where to find him.  The horses
felt that they had brave men on their backs
and, in that mysterious way peculiar to horses,
caught the spirit of their riders.  Every shell
covered men and horses with chalk and soil,
but they remained an immobile as statuary.  It
was magnificent and it was war.  A driver in
the battery beside us got wounded in the leg
and hand.  He jumped off his horse and came
to us to be bandaged.  Then he leapt back into
the saddle.  It seemed an age, but I suppose
it was only a few minutes, before the obstruction
was removed.  The whips flashed in the
air and the horses sprang forward.  The guns
rocked and swayed as they swept past us and
within a few minutes they were in their new
positions under the hill upon which lay the
ruins of Neuville Vitasse.

The shelling ceased as suddenly as it had
started and we lifted out our wounded soldier
and went in the direction of the dressing
station.  Some distance up the road my attention
was called to one of the drivers whom the
artillery had left in the care of some privates.
He was living, but his skull was broken, and
he would never wake again to consciousness.
He was fast "going West."  His day was over
and his work was done.  I got him lifted on
to a stretcher and taken to the dressing station
so that he might die in peace and be buried
in the little soldiers' cemetery behind it.

When I returned in the evening to our billet
I told the transport officer of the magnificent
bravery of the artillery drivers.

"Any other drivers would behave just as
well, if caught in the same trap," he replied.

He spoke the simple truth.  They would.
Such supreme courage and devotion to duty are
common to the army.  Their presence among
all ranks and in all sections of the army makes
the fact the more wonderful.  Both officers and
men love life, but they love duty more, and
commanders in drawing up their plans know
that they can rely on their soldiers to carry
them out.  Our Tommies never fail us whether
in France, Mesopotamia, or Palestine.  Devotion
to duty is inwoven with the fibers of their
hearts.  They are men who, either in kindness
to captives or courage amid disaster and
destruction, never fail us.





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.. _`THE CROSS AT NEUVE CHAPELLE`:

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   XIV


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   THE CROSS AT NEUVE CHAPELLE

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The war on the Western Front has been
fought in a Roman Catholic country
where crucifixes are erected at all the
chief cross-roads to remind us that, in every
moment of doubt as to the way of life, and
on whichever road we finally decide to walk,
whether rough or smooth, we shall need the
Saviour and His redeeming love.  We have
seen a cross so often when on the march, or
when passing down some trench, that it has
become inextricably mixed up with the war.
When we think of the great struggle the vision
of the cross rises before us, and when we see
the cross, we think of processions of wounded
men who have been broken to save the world.
Whenever we have laid a martyred soldier to
rest, we have placed over him, as the comment
on his death, a simple white cross bearing his
name.  We never paint any tribute on it.
None is needed, for nothing else could speak so
eloquently as a cross--a white cross.  White
is the sacred color in the army of to-day, and
the cross is the sacred form.  In after years
there will never be any doubt as to where the
line of liberty ran that held back the flood and
force of German tyranny.  From the English
Channel to Switzerland it is marked for all
time with the crosses on the graves of the
British and French soldiers.  Whatever may
be our views about the erection of crucifixes
by the wayside and at the cross-roads, no one
can deny that they have had an immense
influence for good on our men during the war
in France.

The experience of many a gallant soldier is
expressed in the following Belgian poem:

   |  "I came to a halt at the bend of the road;
   |  I reached for my ration, and loosened my load;
   |  I came to a halt at the bend of the road.

   |  "O weary the way, Lord; forsaken of Thee,
   |  My spirit is faint--lone, comfortless me;
   |  O weary the way, Lord; forsaken of Thee.

   |  "And the Lord answered, Son, be thy heart lifted up,
   |  I drank, as thou drinkest, of agony's cup;
   |  And the Lord answered, Son, be thy heart lifted up.

   |  "For thee that I loved, I went down to the grave,
   |  Pay thou the like forfeit thy Country to save;
   |  For thee that I loved, I went down to the grave.

   |  "Then I cried, 'I am Thine, Lord; yea, unto this last.'
   |  And I strapped on my knapsack, and onward I passed.
   |  Then I cried, 'I am Thine, Lord; yea, unto this last.'

   |  "Fulfilled is the sacrifice.  Lord, is it well?
   |  Be it said--for the dear sake of country he fell.
   |  Fulfilled is the sacrifice.  Lord, is it well?"
   |

The Cross has interpreted life to the soldier
and has provided him with the only acceptable
philosophy of the war.  It has taught boys
just entering upon life's experience that,
out-topping all history and standing out against
the background of all human life, is a Cross
on which died the Son of God.  It has made
the hill of Calvary stand out above all other
hills in history.  Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon--these
may stand at the foot of the hill, as
did the Roman soldiers, but they are made to
look mean and insignificant as the Cross rises
above them, showing forth the figure of the Son
of Man.  Against the sky-line of human history
the Cross stands clearly, and all else is in
shadow.  The wayside crosses at the Front and
the flashes of roaring guns may not have taught
our soldiers much history, but they have taught
them the central fact of history; and all else
will have to accommodate itself to that, or
be disbelieved.  The Cross of Christ is the
center of the picture for evermore, and the
grouping of all other figures must be round it.

To the soldiers it can never again be made a
detail in some other picture.  Seen also in the
light of their personal experience it has taught
them that as a cross lies at the basis of the
world's life and shows bare at every crisis of
national and international life so, at the root
of all individual life, is a cross.  They have
been taught to look for it at every parting of
the ways.  Suffering to redeem others and make
others happy will now be seen as the true
aim of life and not the grasping of personal
pleasure or profit.  They have stood where
high explosive shells thresh out the corn from
the chaff--the true from the false.  They have
seen facts in a light that lays things stark
and bare; and the cant talked by skeptical
armchair-philosophers will move them as little
as the chittering of sparrows on the housetops.
For three long years our front-line trenches
have run through what was once a village
called Neuve Chapelle.  There is nothing left
of it now.  But there is something there which
is tremendously impressive.  It is a crucifix.
It stands out above everything, for the land
is quite flat around it.  The cross is immediately
behind our firing trench, and within two
or three hundred yards of the German front
trench.  The figure of Christ is looking across
the waste of No Man's Land.  Under His right
arm and under His left, are British soldiers
holding the line.  Two dud shells lie at the
the foot.  One is even touching the wood,
but though hundreds of shells must have swept
by it, and millions of machine-gun bullets, it
remains undamaged.  Trenches form a labyrinth
all round it.  When our men awake and
"stand-to" at dawn the first sight they see is
the cross; and when at night they lie down in
the side of the trench, or turn into their
dug-outs, their last sight is the cross.  It stands
clear in the noon-day sun; and in the moonlight
it takes on a solemn grandeur.

I first saw it on a November afternoon when
the sun was sinking under heavy banks of
cloud, and it bent my mind back to the scene
as it must have been on the first Good Friday,
when the sun died with its dying Lord, and
darkness crept up the hill of Calvary and
covered Him with its funeral pall to hide His
dying agonies from the curious eyes of
unbelieving men.  I had had tea in a dug-out, and
it was dark when I left.  Machine-guns were
sweeping No Man's Land to brush back
enemies that might be creeping towards us through
the long grass; and the air was filled with a
million clear, cracking sounds.  Star-shells rose
and fell and their brilliant lights lit up the
silent form on the cross.

For three years, night and day, Christ has
been standing there in the midst of our soldiers,
with arms outstretched in blessing.  They
have looked up at Him through the clear
starlight of a frosty night; and they have seen
His pale face by the silver rays of the moon
as she has sailed her course through the
heavens.  In the gloom of a stormy night they
have seen the dark outline, and caught a
passing glimpse of Christ's effigy by the flare
of the star-shells.  What must have been the
thoughts of the sentries in the listening posts
as all night long they have gazed at the cross;
or of the officers as they have passed down
the trench to see that all was well; or of some
private sleeping in the trench and, being
awakened by the cold, taking a few steps to
restore blood-circulation?  Deep thoughts, I
imagine, much too deep for words of theirs
or mine.

And when the Battle of Neuve Chapelle was
raging and the wounded, whose blood was
turning red the grass, looked up at Him, what
thoughts must have been theirs then?  Did
they not feel that He was their big Brother
and remember that blood had flowed from
Him as from them; that pain had racked Him
as it racked them; and that He thought of
His mother and of Nazareth as they thought
of their mother and the little cottage they were
never to see again?  When their throats
became parched and their lips swollen with thirst
did they not remember how He, too, had cried
for a drink; and, most of all, did they not
call to mind the fact that He might have saved
Himself, as they might, if He had cared more
for His own happiness than for the world's?
As their spirits passed out through the wounds
in their bodies would they not ask Him to
remember them as their now homeless souls
knocked at the gate of His Kingdom?  He had
stood by them all through the long and bloody
battle while hurricanes of shells swept over
and around Him.  I do not wonder that the
men at the Front flock to the Lord's Supper
to commemorate His death.  They will not go
without it.  If the Sacrament be not provided,
they ask for it.  At home there was never such
a demand for it as exists at the Front.  There
is a mystic sympathy between the trench and the
Cross, between the soldier and his Saviour.

And yet, to those who willed the war and
drank to the day of its coming, even the Cross
has no sacredness.  It is to them but a tool
of war.  An officer told me that during the
German retreat from the Somme they noticed
a peculiar accuracy in the enemy's firing.  The
shells followed an easily distinguishable course.
So many casualties occurred from this accurate
shelling that the officers set themselves to
discover the cause.  They found that the circle
of shells had for its center the cross-roads, and
that at the cross-roads was a crucifix that stood
up clearly as a land-mark.  Evidently the
crosses were being used to guide the gunners,
and was causing the death of our men.  But
a more remarkable thing came to light.  The
cross stood close to the road, and when the
Germans retired they had sprung a mine at the
cross-roads to delay our advance.  Everything
near had been blown to bits by the explosion
except the crucifix which had not a mark upon it.
And yet it could not have escaped, except by
a miracle.  They therefore set themselves to
examine the seeming miracle and came across
one of the most astounding cases of fiendish
cunning.  They found that the Germans had
made a concrete socket for the crucifix so that
they could take it out or put it in at pleasure.
Before blowing up the cross-roads they had
taken the cross out of its socket and removed
it to a safe distance, then, when the mine had
exploded, they put the cross back so that it
might be a landmark to direct their shooting.
And now they were using Christ's instrument
of redemption as an instrument for men's destruction.

But our young officers resolved to restore
the cross to its work of saving men.  They
waited till night fell, and then removed the cross
to a point a hundred or two yards to the left.
When in the morning the German gunners
fired their shells their observers found that the
shells fell too far wide of the cross and they
could make nothing of the mystery.  It looked
as if someone had been tampering with their
guns in the night.  To put matters right they
altered the position of their guns so that once
more the shells made a circle round the cross.
And henceforth our soldiers were safe, for the
shells fell harmlessly into the outlying fields.
Nor was this the only time during their retreat
that the Germans put the cross to this base use
and were foiled in their knavery.

When a nation scraps the Cross of Christ
and turns it into a tool to gain an advantage
over its opponents, it becomes superfluous to
ask who began the war, and folly to close our
eyes to the horrors and depravities which are
being reached in the waging of it.

There is a new judgment of the nations now
proceeding and who shall predict what shall
be?  The Cross of Christ is the arbiter, and
our attitude towards it decides our fate.  I
have seen the attitude of our soldiers towards
the cross at Neuve Chapelle and towards
that for which it stands; and I find more
comfort in their reverence for Christ and
Christianity than in all their guns and impediments
of war.

The Cross of Christ towers above the wrecks
of time, and the nations will survive that stand
beneath its protecting arms in the trenches of
righteousness, liberty and truth.





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.. _`THE CHILDREN OF OUR DEAD`:

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   XV


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   THE CHILDREN OF OUR DEAD

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There are times when we get away from
the Front for a rest.  We hear no
more the sound of the guns, but give
ourselves up to the silence and charm of the
country.  Before going into the Somme
fighting we were billeted for ten days in the
neighboring village to Cressy; and as the anniversary
of the battle came that week the colonel chose
the day for a march to the battlefield.  The
owner of the field, when the old windmill
stood, from which King Edward III directed
his army, came to meet us and describe the
battle.  When the war is over he is going to
erect a monument on the spot to the memory
of the French and British troops who in comradeship
have died fighting against the common foe.

They were happy days that we spent around
Cressy.  The last that some were destined to
know this side of the Great Divide.  The
bedroom next to mine was occupied by two fine
young officers of utterly different type.  One
was a Greek whose father had taken out
naturalization papers and loved the country of
his adoption with a worshiping passion that
would shame many native born.  The other
was a charming, argumentative, systematic,
theological student of Scots parentage.  The
night before we left, the Greek accidentally
broke his mirror and was much upset.  It was,
he said, a token that Death was about to claim
him.  The Scot laughed heartily, for he had
not a trace of the superstitious in him; or, if he
had--which was more than likely--it was kept
under by his strong reasoning faculties.

"If you are to be killed," he replied, "I am
to be killed too, for I also have broken my
mirror."

He spoke the words in jest, or with hardly
a discernible undercurrent of seriousness; but
they were true words nevertheless.  The two
bed-mates were killed in the same battle a week
or two later.  I had tea with them in their
dug-out on the eve of the fight.  They were
to take up their positions in an hour, but the
student could not resist having just one more
argument.  He directed the conversation to the
New Theology, and to German philosophers
and Biblical scholars.  He simply talked me
off my feet, for he possessed the most brilliant
intellect in the regiment, combined with
self-reliance and perfect modesty.  Then the
conversation turned to the question of taking a tot
of rum before going over the parapet.  He
was a rigid teetotaler, "for," said he, "drink
is the ruin of my country."  He was opposed
to the idea of taking rum to help one's courage
or allay his fears.  He would not, he said, go
under with his eyes bandaged.  He would
take a good look at Death and dare him to
do his worst.  He was superb, and Death never
felled a manlier man.  Browning would have
loved him as his own soul for he had Browning's
attitude to life exactly, and could have
sung with him,

   |      "Fear death? ...
   |  I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
   |      The best and the last!
   |  I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
   |      And bade me creep past.
   |  No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
   |      The heroes of old,
   |  Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
   |      Of pain, darkness and cold.
   |  For sudden the worst turns best to the brave,
   |      The black minute's at end,
   |  And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
   |      Shall dwindle, shall blend,
   |  Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
   |      Then a light...
   |      And with God be the rest!"
   |

He was found with his "body against the
wall where the forts of folly fall."  His brave,
intelligent face was completely blown away.
His Greek friend was wounded, and while
being dressed in a shell-hole by his servant, was
hit again and killed.

Some weeks later all that remained of the
regiment was drawn out to a little village some
miles from Amiens, and very similar to the
one we had occupied near Cressy.  We were
taken to it in motor-'buses for the men were
too exhausted to march, and the days spent
there were days of great delight.  We had a
glorious, crowded-out service on the Sunday.
It was both a thanksgiving and a memorial
service, and I spoke to the men on "The
Passing of the Angels."

"When the music ceased," I said, "and the
herald-angels departed, the sky became very
empty, cold and gray to the Shepherds; and
they said one to another, 'let us now go even
unto Bethlehem.'  And they went and found
out Jesus.  If the angels had stayed the
shepherds would have stayed with them.  The
angels had to come to point them to Jesus but,
that done, they had to go away to make the
shepherds desire Jesus and seek Him.  'When
the half-gods go the gods arrive.'  The angels
had to make room for Jesus and the second
best had to yield place to the best.  When John
the Baptist was killed his disciples went in their
sorrow to Jesus; and having lost our noble
comrades, we must go to Him also.  The best
in our friends came from Jesus as the sweet
light of the moon comes from the sun; and we
must go to the Source.  If we find and keep
to Jesus, sooner or later we shall find our lost
friends again, for 'them also which sleep in
Jesus will God bring with him!'"

In some such words I tried to comfort those
who had left their comrades behind in the
graves on the Somme; for I know how deeply
they felt the loss.  During the week we had
dinner parties, and all kinds of jolly social
intercourse.  It was amusing to see the delight
everyone felt at having a bed to sleep in.
"Look Padre, at these white sheets," an officer
cried as I passed his window.  He was as
merry over them as if a rich maiden aunt had
remembered him in her will.  Some got "leave"
home, and were so frankly joyful about it that
it made the rest of us both glad and envious.
We made up for it somewhat by getting leave
to spend an occasional day in Amiens.  There
I went into the glorious cathedral.  Almost the
whole of the front was sandbagged, but even
thus, it was a "thing of beauty" and has
become for me a "joy forever."

Except Rouen Cathedral I have seen nothing
to equal it.  Notre Dame, with its invisible
yet clinging tapestry of history, is more deeply
moving.  But it is sadder--more sombre.
Something of the ugliness and tragedy of
by-gone days peep out in it; but Amiens Cathedral
is a thing of pure joy and beauty.  It suggests
fairies, while Notre Dame suggests goblins.

While I was looking at its glorious
rose-windows which were casting their rich colors
on the pillars, a father and his two children
came in.  The man and son dipped their
fingers in the shell of holy water, crossed their
foreheads and breasts with the water, and were
passing on; but the little girl who was too
short to reach the shell, took hold of her
father's arm and pulled him back.  She, too,
wished to dip her fingers in holy water, and
make the sign of the cross over her mind and
heart.  The father yielded to her importunity
and touched her hand with his wet fingers.
She made the sacred sign and was satisfied.
The father and son had remembered their own
needs but forgotten the child's.

After all the tragic happenings on the
Somme why should this little incident linger in
my memory like a primrose in a crater?  Did
it not linger *because* of the tragedy of the
preceding weeks?  I had been living weeks
together without seeing a child and after the
slaughter of youth which I had witnessed the
sight of a child in a cathedral was inexpressibly
beautiful.  The father's neglect of its finer
needs gave me pain.  We have lost so many
young men, that every child and youth left to
us ought to be cared for as the apple of our
eye.  We have lost more than our young men.
We have lost those who would have been their
children.  The little ones who might have been,
have gone to their graves with their fathers.

The old recruiting cry, "the young and single
first" was necessary from a military standpoint
but, from a merely human point of view,
I could never see much justice in it.  The young
had no responsibility, direct or indirect, for the
war.  They were given life and yet before
they could taste it, they were called upon to
die in our behalf.  We who are older have
tasted of life and love; the residue of our years
will be much the same as those that have gone
before; there will be little of surprise or
newness of experience.  Perhaps, too, we have
living memorials of ourselves, so that if we die,
our personality and name will still live on.
Our death will only be partial.  While William
Pitt lived could it be said that Lord Chatham
had died?  His body was dead, truly, but his
spirit found utterance in the British House of
Commons every time his son spoke, and
Napoleon felt the strength of his arm as truly
did Montcalm on the Heights of Abraham.  I
should not have mourned the loss of the young
Scot and the Greek so much, had they left to
the world some image and likeness of
themselves.  In dying, they gave more than
themselves to death;

   |  "Those who would have been
   |  Their sons they gave--their immortality."
   |

After a summer on the Somme, I have come
to understand something of how fear of the
devouring maw of Time became almost an
obsession with Shakespeare.  Death had taken
from him some of the dearest intimates of his
heart, and taken them young.  And so, like the
sound of a funeral-bell echoing down the lane
where lovers walk, there is heard through all
his sonnets and poems of love the approaching
footsteps of death.  Sometimes the footsteps
sound faintly, but they are seldom absent.
How then would he have felt in a war like
this, in which the "young and single" have gone
out by the hundred thousand to prematurely die?

Others, however, who have given their lives
were married men, and they have left images
of themselves in trust to the nation.  We know
the last thoughts of a dying father.  Captain
Falcon Scott as he lay dying at the South Pole
has expressed them for all time.  "Take care
of the boy," he said, "there should be good
stuff in him."  He found comfort in the
reflection that he would, though he died, live on
in his son; but he was saddened by the thought
that the son would have to face the battle of
life without a father to back him up.  The
boy would therefore need special "care."

On the evening of the first battle of the
Somme I spoke to a young officer as he lay in
a bed at the Field Ambulance.  He had lost
his right arm and he told me how it had
happened.  He was charging across No Man's
Land when a shell cut it off near the shoulder,
and flung it several yards away.  As he saw
it fall to the ground the sight so overcame him
that he cried aloud in distress, "Oh my arm!
My beautiful arm."  He was still mourning
its loss, so, to comfort him, I told him that
Nelson lost *his* right arm and won the Battle
of Trafalgar after he had lost it.  Like
Nelson, I told him, he would learn to write with
his left hand and still do a man's job.  He
would not be useless in life as he feared.
When the children of our dead soldiers charge
across No Man's Land in the battle of life
they will think of their lost fathers, and the
agonizing cry of the young wounded soldier
will rise to their lips, "Oh my arm, my
beautiful arm."  The State is providing artificial
arms for our wounded soldiers.  Will it be a
right arm to the children of its dead?  Will
it be a father to the fatherless and a husband
to the widow?  Unless it is ready for this
sacred task, it had no right to ask for and
accept the lives of these men.

The State, with the help of the Church, must
resolve that no child shall suffer because its
father was a hero and patriot.  The State must
help the child to the shell of holy water without
the little one having to pull at its arm to
remind it of its duties.  If the children of our
dead soldiers lack education, food, moral and
spiritual guidance, or a proper start in life,
no words will be condemnatory enough to
adequately describe the nation's crime and
ingratitude.  They are the sons and daughters
of heroes and there "should be good stuff" in
them.  It is the nation's privilege, as well as
its duty, to take the place of their fathers.

A few days later I walked into Arras from
the neighboring village.  There were guns all
along the road, and there was not a house but
bore the mark of shells.  Some of the civilians
had remained, but these were mostly old people
who could not settle elsewhere, and who
preferred to die at home rather than live in a
strange place.  One house impressed me
greatly.  It had been badly damaged but, its
garden was untouched and in it were half a
dozen rose-trees.  It was the beginning of
spring, and each tree was covered over with
sacking to preserve it from the cold and
fragments of shells.  The owner did not care
sufficiently for his own life to move away, but he
cared for the life of his roses.  And so, when
the summer came there were roses in at least
one garden in Arras.

The noise of the guns was terrific and the
old man had to live in the cellar, but he found
leisure of soul to cultivate his roses.  His action
was one of the most beautiful things I have
seen in the entire war.  The children of our
homes are more beautiful than Arras roses,
and more difficult to rear.  May we trust our
country not to neglect them?  Will she save
them from the mark of the shell, and help
them to grow up to a full and perfect loveliness?
Our dying soldiers have trusted her to do it.
From their graves they plead,

   |  "If ye break faith with us who die,
   |  We shall not sleep, though poppies blow
   |  In Flanders fields."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A FUNERAL UNDER FIRE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   XVI


.. class:: center large bold

   A FUNERAL UNDER FIRE

.. vspace:: 2

It was in a ruined village behind the
trenches.  A fatigue party had just come
out of the line, and was on its way to
rest-billets in the next village.  The men were
tired so they sat down to rest in the deserted
street.  Suddenly, a scream, as from a
disembodied spirit, pierced the air.  There was a
crash, a cloud of smoke, and five men lay
dead on the pavement, and twelve wounded.
Next morning I was asked to bury one of the
dead.  Under a glorious July sky a Roman
Catholic chaplain and I cycled between desolate
fields into the village.  A rifleman guided
us down a communication-trench till we came
to the cemetery.  It was a little field fenced
with trees.  There we found a Church of
England chaplain.  He and the Catholic
chaplain had two men each to bury.

A burial party was at work on the five graves.
It was the fatigue party of the evening before,
and the men were preparing the last resting
place of those who had died at their side.
They worked rapidly, for all the morning the
village had been under a bombardment which
had not as yet ceased.  Before they had
finished they were startled by the familiar but
fatal scream of a shell and threw themselves
on the ground.  It burst a short distance away
without doing harm, and the soldiers went on
with their work, as if nothing had happened.
When the graves were ready, two of the bodies
were brought out and lowered with ropes.
The Church of England chaplain read the
burial service over them, and we all stood round
as mourners.  Two more bodies were brought
out and we formed a circle round them while
the Roman Catholic chaplain read the burial
service of his Church--chiefly, in Latin.  There
now remained but one, and he, in turn, was
quietly lowered into his grave.  He was still
wearing his boots and uniform and was wrapped
around with his blanket.

   |  "No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
   |  Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
   |  But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
   |  With his martial cloak around him."
   |

All his comrades who had been with him in
the dread hour of death were mourning by his
grave, and standing with them were his officer
and two chaplains.  I read the full service as
it is given in our Prayer Book.  It was all
that one could do for him.  The Catholic
chaplain had sprinkled consecrated water on the
bodies and I sprinkled consecrated soil.  Was
it not in truth holy soil?  Behind me was one
long, common grave in which lay buried a
hundred and ten French soldiers; "110 Braves"
was the inscription the cross bore.  In front of
me were three rows of graves in which were
lying British soldiers.  French and British
soldiers were mingling their dust.  In death, as in
life, they were not divided.

I felt led to offer no prayer for the lad at
my feet, nor for his dead comrades.  He needed
no prayer of mine; rather did I need his.  He
was safe home in port.  The storm had spent
itself and neither rock, nor fog, nor fire would
trouble him again.  His living comrades and
I were still out in the storm, battling towards
the land.  He had no need of us, but his parents
and comrades had need of him.  We were
there to pay a tribute to his life and death, to
pray for his loved ones, and to learn how frail
we are and how dependent upon Him who is
beyond the reach of the chances and changes
of this mortal life.

I was half way through the recital of the
last prayer--"We bless Thy Holy Name for
all Thy servants departed this life in Thy
faith and fear"--when that fatal, well-known
scream, as of a vulture darting down on its
prey, again tore the air.  The men, as they
had been taught, dropped to the ground like
stones.  My office demanded that I should
continue the prayer, and leave with God the
decision as to how it should end.  There was a
crash, and the branches of the trees overhead
trembled as some fragments of shell smote
them.  But there was nothing more.  The men
rose as quickly as they had fallen, and all were
reverently standing to attention before the last
words of the prayer found utterance.  The
graves were filled in and we went our several
ways.  Next day white crosses were placed
over the five mounds, and we bade them a long
and last farewell.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A SOLDIER'S CALVARY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   XVII


.. class:: center large bold

   A SOLDIER'S CALVARY

.. vspace:: 2

There is one afternoon on the Somme
that stands out in my memory like a
dark hill when the sun has sunk below
the verge and left a lingering bar of red across
the sky.  It was a Calvary thick with the bodies
of our men.  I was looking for the
Westminsters and they were difficult to find.  I
passed over one trench and reached another.
There I asked the men if they knew where the
Westminsters were, and they expressed the
opinion that the regiment was in the trench
ahead.  There was no communication trench
so I followed a fatigue-party for some distance
which was marching in single file, and
carrying hand-grenades to the firing line.  They
turned to the right and I kept straight on.
Every few yards I passed rifles reversed and
fastened in the ground by their bayonets.  They
marked the graves of the dead.  A few
soldiers, but newly killed, were still lying out.

At last I reached a trench and found in it
a number of Westminsters.  They were
signalers on special duty, and they told me that
I had already passed the regiment on my left.
The poor fellows were in a sad plight.  The
weather was cold and they were without
shelter.  There were German dug-outs but they
were partly blown in and full of German dead.
The stench that rose from these, and from the
shallow graves around, was almost unbearable.
Yet there amid falling shells, the lads had to
remain day and night.  Their rations were
brought to them, but as every ounce of food
and drop of water, in addition to the letters
from home, had to be brought on pack mules
through seven or eight miles of field tracks in
which the mules struggled on up to the knees
in sticky mud and sometimes up to the belly,
it was impossible for the regiment to receive
anything beyond water and "iron rations," i.e.,
hard biscuits.  Water was so precious that not
a drop could be spared to wash faces or clean
teeth with, and I always took my own
water-bottle and food, to avoid sharing the scanty
supplies of the officers.  After a little time
spent with the signalers I moved up the trench
and looked in at the little dug-out of the
Colonel commanding.  All the officers present,
bearded almost beyond recognition, were sitting
on the floor.  The enemy had left a small red
electric light, which added an almost absurd
touch of luxury to the miserable place.  Farther
up the trench I found the Brigade Staff
Captain in a similar dug-out and after making
inquiries as to the position of the Queen's
Westminster Regiment which was my objective, I
left to find it; for the sun was already setting.
The path was across the open fields, and the
saddest I have ever trod.  I was alone and
had but little idea of location, but it was
impossible to miss the path.  On the right and
left, it was marked at every few steps with
dead men.  Most of them were still grasping
their rifles.  They had fallen forward as they
rushed over the ground, and their faces--their
poor, blackened, lipless faces--were towards
the foe.  There had, as yet, been no
opportunity to bury them for the ground was still
being shelled and the burial parties had been
all too busily engaged in other parts of the
field.  I longed to search for their identity
discs that I might know who they were and
make a note of the names; but I had to leave
it to the burial party.  I was already feeling
sick with the foul smells in the trench and the
sights on the way, and lacked the strength to
look for the discs around the wrists and necks
of the poor, decomposed bodies.  It had to be
left to men of the burial party whose nerves
were somewhat more hardened to the task by
other experiences of the kind.  It was a new
Calvary on which I was standing.  These poor
bodies miles from home and with no woman's
hands to perform the last offices of affection
were lying there as the price of the world's
freedom.

Would that all who talk glibly of freedom
and justice might have seen what I saw on that
dreary journey, that they might the better
realize the spiritual depths of liberty and
righteousness, and the high cost at which they are won
for the race.  It is fatally easy to persuade
ourselves that there is no need for us to tread the
bitter path of suffering and death--that we can
achieve freedom and justice by being charitable,
and by talking amiably to our enemies.  We
try to believe that they are as anxious to
achieve liberty for the world as we are, that
they are striving to bind mankind in fetters of
iron, only through lack of knowledge as to
our intentions.  Their hearts and intentions are
good but they are misled, and after a little talk
with them around a table they would put off
their "shining armor" and become angels of
light carrying palm branches in place of swords
and fetters.

This is a mighty pleasant theory, only it is
not true; and we cannot get rid of evil by
ignoring it, nor of the devil by buying him a new
suit.  There are men willing to die to destroy
liberty, just as there are others willing to die
in its defense.  It is not that they do not
understand liberty.  They *do*, and that is why they
wish to destroy it.  It is the enemy of their
ideal.  Whether liberty will survive or not,
depends upon whether there are more men
inspired to die in defending liberty, than there
are willing to die in opposing it.  A thing lives
while men love it sufficiently well to die for it.
We get what we deserve; and readiness to die
for it is the price God has put on liberty.

Words are things too cheap to buy it.  When
someone suggested establishing a new religion
to supersede Christianity, Voltaire is reported
to have asked if the founder were willing to
be crucified for it?  Otherwise, it would stand
no chance of success.  It was a deep criticism,
and showed that Voltaire was no fool.  Blood is
the test, not words.  A nation can only achieve
liberty when it is determined to be free or die.
"Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall
lose it."  "Never man spake" as Christ spake,
but He did not save the world by talking to
it, but by dying for it.  Outpoured blood, not
outpoured words, is the proof of moral
convictions and the means of their propaganda;
our soldiers may not be learned in some things,
but they have learned *that*.  They know the
cause will win which has most moral power, and
that the cause with most moral strength will
prove itself to be the one with most martyrs.
And the side with most men ready to be
martyrs will outstay the other.  The spirit of
martyrdom, not negotiation, is the path to
liberty and peace.  You cannot negotiate with
a tiger.  The dispute is too simple for negotiation.
You have to kill the tiger, or yourself be
killed.

While I was on leave, a man told me that
he had asked some soldiers from the Front
why they were fighting, and they could not tell
him.  Probably.  All the deepest things are
of life beyond telling.  No true man can tell
why he loves his wife or children.  This trust
in words, in being able to "tell why," is truly
pathetic.  I would not trust a wife's love if
she could tell her husband exactly *why* she
loved him; nor would I trust our soldiers not
to turn tail in battle if they could *tell* just why
they are fighting.  They cannot *tell*, but with
their poor lipless faces turned defiantly against
the foe they can *show* why they are fighting.
Let those who want to know the soldiers'
reason *why* they fight go and see them there on
the blasted field of battle, not ask them when
they come home on leave.  The lips of a soldier
perish *first*, as his dead body lies exposed on
the battlefield; his rifle he clutches to the last;
and it is a lesson terrible enough for even the
densest talker to understand.

The dead lads lying out in the open with
their rifles pointing towards the enemy voice
their reason why loud enough for the deaf
to hear and the world to heed.  Ideals must
be died for if they are to be realized on
earth, for they have bitter enemies who
stick at nothing.  And we have to defend our
ideal with our lives or be cravens and let it
perish.

History, with unimportant variations, is
constantly repeating itself; and in nothing is it
so consistent as in the price it puts on liberty.
The lease of liberty runs out; the lease has
to be renewed, and it is renewed by suffering
and martyrdom.  The dear dead lads whom
I saw on that terrible afternoon were
renewing the lease.  With their bodies they had
marked out a highway over which the peoples
of the earth may march to freedom and to
justice.

The view, all too common, that our soldiers
regard the war as a kind of picnic, and an
attack as a sort of rush for the goal in a game
of football, is false--false as sin.  It is a view
blind to the whole psychology of the war, and
misses the meaning of our soldiers' gayety as
much as it ignores their fear and sorrow.  The
trenches are a Gethsemane to them and their
prayer is, "Our Father, all things are possible
unto Thee: take away this cup from me:
nevertheless not what I will, but what Thou wilt."

One day, when I went into a mess-room in
which letters were being censored, an officer
said to me, "Read this, Padre, there's a
reference to you, and a candid expression of a man's
attitude towards religion."

I took the letter and it read: "Our chaplain
isn't far out when he says, in his book, that
though we may speak lightly of the church we
don't think or speak lightly of Christ.
However careless we may be when we are out of
the trenches, when we are in we all pray.
There is nothing else we can do."

I have been eighteen months with a fighting
regiment on the Front, and I have never spoken
to any officer who did not regard it as a
mathematical certainty that, unless he happened to
fall sick or be transferred--neither of which
he expected--he would be either killed or
wounded.  And I agreed with him without
saying it.  He does not even hope to escape
wounds.  They are inevitable if he stays long
enough; for one battle follows another and his
time comes.  He only hopes to escape death
and the more ghastly wounds.  He hopes the
wound when it comes will be a "cushy one."  The
men take the same view.  The period before
going into the trenches, or into battle, is
to them like the Garden of Gethsemane was
to Christ; they are "exceeding sorrowful" and
in their presence I have often felt as one who
stood "as it were, a stone's throw" from them.
They are going out with the expectation of
meeting death.

On the 1st of July, 1916, twenty officers in
our regiment went over the top.  Nineteen
were killed or wounded and the one who
returned to the regiment was suffering from
shell-shock and had to be sent home.  Although
our losses are much lower now, the officers and
men experience the agony and bloody sweat
of Gethsemane rather than the pleasure of a
picnic in Epping Forest.  This explains, too,
their gayety.  It is the happiness of men who
know that they are doing their bit for the
world's good, and playing the man, not the
cad.  The rise of happiness into gayety is the
natural reaction from the sorrow and alarm
which have been clouding their hearts.  In
peace time they will never know either the
intensity of joy or sorrow they know now.  A
man never feels so truly humorous as when he
is sad.  Humor is a kind of inverted sadness.
The most exquisite sadness produces the most
exquisite humor as the deepest wells give the
sweetest, purest and coldest water.

   |  Tears and laughter are never far from one another,
   |  The heart overflows on one side, and then on the other.
   |

Our soldiers' minds are not filled with
thoughts of Germans, but with thoughts of the
friends they have left behind them.  Nor do
they often think of killing Germans.  They
neither think so much of the Germans nor so
bitterly of them as do the people at home.
The Germans have not the same prominence
in the picture.  Deeds relieve their emotions in
regard to the Germans and leave their hearts
open for the things and folk they love.

It is commonly supposed (and this idea is
fostered by some war correspondents), that
when our men go over the top they are
possessed with a mad lust to kill Germans.  The
ultimate aim of a general planning a battle is
to kill Germans no doubt, for that is the only
way to achieve victory; and if the Germans do
not want to be killed they know what to do.
Let them surrender or retire.  The private
agrees with the general in the necessity for
killing Germans, but that is not what he is
thinking of when he goes over the top; nor is
it what we should be thinking of in his place.
He is thinking of the Germans killing him.
Life is sweet at nineteen or one-and-twenty.  It
pleads to be spared a little longer.  A lad does
not want to die; and as he goes over the parapet
he is thinking less of taking German lives than
of losing his own.  He knows that German
heads will not fit English shoulders, and that,
however many enemy lives he may take, none
of them will restore his own if he loses it, as
he is quite likely to do.  He is going out to
be mutilated or to die.  That is his standpoint
whatever may be the general's or the
war-correspondent's.  He goes for his country's sake
and the right.  It is his duty, and there is an
end of it.

Most of the killing in modern war is done
by the artillery and machine-guns.  Comparatively
few men have seen the face of an enemy
they know themselves to have killed.  A
regiment goes out to be shot at, rather than to
shoot.  Unless this simple fact be grasped, the
mentality of the soldier cannot be understood.
The lust for killing Germans would never take
a man out of his dug-out; but the love of his
country and the resolve to do his duty will take
him out and lead him over the top.  It is what
he volunteered for, but it goes hard when the
time comes for all that.

The unburied men I saw had, but a short
while ago, no idea of becoming soldiers.  They
were the light of a home and the stay of a
business.  With that they were content.  But
the challenge came; and they went out to
defend the right against the wrong--the true
against the false.  They toiled up a new
Calvary "with the cross that turns not back," and
now they lie buried in a strange land.  They
have lost all for themselves, but they have
gained all for us and for those who will come
after us.  Yet although they saved others,
themselves they could not save.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE HOSPITAL TRAIN`:

.. class:: center large bold

   XVIII


.. class:: center large bold

   THE HOSPITAL TRAIN

.. vspace:: 2

We were carried from our regiments to
the hospital in ambulance cars.  I,
and several others, had trench fever.
Some were suffering from gas poisoning.  One
lovely boy--for he was nothing more--was
near to death with "mustard" gas.  The doctor
at the Dressing Station had opened a vein and
bled him of a pint of blood.  It was the only
hope of saving him.  But as the car bumped
over the rough roads and the gas in his lungs
grew more suffocating he almost despaired of
reaching the hospital alive.  Others were
wounded; and one had appendicitis.  After a
period in hospital, during which we were
honored with a visit by General Byng, it was
decided that we should go to the Base.  We lay
down on stretchers, and orderlies carried us to
the waiting cars.  At the station we were lifted
into the hospital train.  The racks had been
taken down and stretchers put in their places.
These were reserved for the "lying cases."  The
"sitting cases" occupied the seats--one to
each corner.  It was afternoon and as soon as
the train began to move tea was served.  The
train sped on and, about sun-set, a most
excellent dinner was provided by the orderlies on
board.

It was the time of the new moon.  "Keep
the window open," said one, "it is unlucky to
see the new moon through glass, and we need
all the good luck we can get," and he avoided
looking through the glass until he had seen the
moon through the open window.  We chatted,
read our magazines, or slept--just as we felt
inclined.  The night wore on and at about two
o'clock we reached Rouen.  Cars rushed us to
one of the Red Cross hospitals.  A doctor
slipped out of bed, examined our cards, decided
in which wards we should be put, and orderlies
led or carried us thither.  A nurse showed each
of us to his room.  We were got to bed and
another nurse brought some tea.  Next
morning we were examined and put down for
removal across the Channel.

The nurses are radiant as sunshine, and
diffuse a spirit of merriment throughout the
hospital.  It was a pure joy to be under their
care.  At three o'clock the following morning,
without previous warning, a nurse came and
awakened us.  We had half an hour to dress.
Another nurse then came round with a dainty
breakfast.  We were then put into cars and
taken to the hospital train.  It left as dawn
was breaking, and we were on our way to
"Blighty."  We had a comfortable journey and
reached Havre about nine.  Orderlies carried
us on board ship and we were taken to our
cots.  Breakfast was served immediately.  We
felt a huge content; and hoped to be across by
night.  But the ship remained by the quay all
day.  In the evening it moved out of the harbor
and lay near its mouth.  Towards midnight it
slipped its anchor and headed for home.

All had received life-belts and a card directing
us which boat to make for, should the ship
be torpedoed.  Mine was "Boat 5, Starboard."  My
neighbor on the right had been on a torpedoed
boat once and had no desire to be on
another.  The lights of the ship were obscured
or put out, and we silently stole over the waters
towards the much desired haven.  There was
no sound but the steady thump of the engines,
and we were soon asleep.  Shortly after dawn
we awoke to find ourselves in Southampton
Water.  A water-plane drew near, settled like
a gull on the water, and then plowed its way
through the waves with the speed of a motor-boat.

About nine o'clock we were carried off the
boat to the station.  Women workers supplied us
with telegraph forms, confectionery and
cigarettes; orderlies brought us tea.  We were then
taken to the train.  It was even more comfortable
than the hospital trains in France; and we had
women nurses.  On each side of the train, for
its full length, were comfortable beds and we
were able to sit up or recline at our pleasure.
Lunch was served on board, and of a character
to tempt the most ailing man.  No shortage
of food is allowed to obtain on the hospital
train.  It has the first claim on the food supply
and it has the first claim to the railroad.  It
stops at no station except for its own
convenience.  Even the King's train stops to let
the hospital train pass.

We were under the care of a nurse who had
reached middle life.  She had been on a
torpedoed hospital ship! on one that struck a
mine without bursting it; and on another that
collided with a destroyer in the dark.  She was
greatly disappointed at the decision which had
removed nurses from the hospital ships because
of the danger from submarines.  She fully
appreciated the chivalry of the men who would
not let their women be drowned; but it had
robbed the women of a chance of proving their
devotion, and she could not see why the men
should do all the dying.  The women were
ready to meet death with the men and as their
mates and equals.  Their place was with the
wounded whatever might befall, and they were
ready.

Hospital trains have run daily for three
years now, and human nature can get used to
anything.  We thought, therefore, that the
people would have become used to the hospital
train.  But greater surprise never gladdened a
man's heart than the one which awaited us as
we steamed out of Southampton.  All the
women and children by the side of the railway
were at their windows or in their gardens,
waving their hands to us.  And all the way to
Manchester the waving of welcoming hands
never ceased.  At every station the porters
doffed their caps to the hospital train as it sped
past.  There was not a station large or small
that did not greet us with a group of proud
smiling faces.  Our eyes were glued to the
windows all the way.  For one day in our lives,
at least, we were kings, and our procession
through "England's green and pleasant land"
was a royal one.  We passed through quiet
country districts but at every wall or fence
there were happy faces.  We wondered where
they all came from, and how they knew of our
coming.  There were tiny children sitting on
all the railway fences waving hands to us.
One little girl of four or five was sitting on the
fence by a country station and waving her little
hand.  We had not seen English children for
months and Pope Gregory spoke the truth
ages ago when he said that they are "not
Angles but Angels."  The sight of them after
so long an absence was as refreshing to the
spirit as the sight of violets and primroses
after a long and bitter winter.

At Birmingham the train made its only stop.
Men and women of the St. John Ambulance
Association boarded the train and supplied us
with tea; and, as the train moved out, stood
at attention on the platform.  At Manchester
we received a warm welcome that told us we
were in Lancashire.  Men and women helped
us to the waiting cars and handed cups of tea
to us.  It was raining of course--being
Manchester--but as we passed near a railway arch
a waiting crowd rushed out into the rain and
startled us with a cry of welcome which was also
a cry of pain.  Most of the men in the cars
were Lancashire lads and in the welcome given
them there were tears as well as smiles.
Lancashire has a great heart as well as a long head.
It suffers with those who suffer and the cry of
the heart was heard in the welcome of its
voice.  There was a welcome too, at the door
of the hospital and at the door of each ward.
Water was brought to our bedside, and then
a tray bearing a well-cooked dinner.

We had reached home.





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.. _`AFTER WINTER, SPRING`:

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   XIX


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   AFTER WINTER, SPRING

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A man's heart must be dead within him
if, under the summer sun, he can look
on the desolated ground of the Western
battle-front without feeling emotions of
joy and hope.  In the winter-time the clumps
of blasted trees looked like groups of forsaken
cripples.  Their broken branches stood out
against the gray sky in utter nakedness, as if
appealing to heaven against the inhumanity of
man.  In a way, it was more depressing to
pass a ruined wood than a destroyed village.
Some of the trees had all their limbs shattered;
others, thicker than a man's body, were cut
clean through the middle; others, again, were
torn clean up by the roots and lay sprawling
on the ground.  It seemed impossible that spring
could ever again clothe them in her garments
of gladdening green.  We imagined the trees
would appear amid the sunshine of the
summer black, gaunt and irreconcilable; pointing
their mangled stumps towards those who had
done them such irreparable wrong and, as the
wind whistled through them, calling on all
decent men to rise up and avenge them of their
enemies.

But, suddenly, we found that the reconciling
spring was back in the woods exercising all
her oldtime witchery.  Each broken limb was
covered with fresh foliage and each scarred
stump put out sprouts of green.  The broken
but blossoming woods grew into a picture of
Hope, infinitely more sublime and touching
than the one to which Watts gave the name.
It was a picture drawn and colored by the
finger of God, and it made the fairest of man's
handiwork look weak and incomplete.  Uprooted
trees lay on the ground in full blossom,
and shell-lopped branches again took on the
form of beauty.  The transformation was
wonderful to behold.

And it all happened in a week.  When our
men went into the trenches the trees were
black, bare and bruised, but when they came
out of the front line into the support-trenches
the wood behind them was a tender green and
had grown curved and symmetrical.  It seemed
as if the fairies of our childhood had returned
to the earth and were dwelling in the wood.
Although two long-range naval guns lay hidden
behind it, which, with deep imprecations opened
their terrible mouths to hurl fiery thunderbolts
at the enemy, the fairies seemed unafraid and
daily continued to weave for the trees beautiful
garments of leaf and blossom.  I have seen
nothing that brought such gladness to both
officers and men.  A new spirit seemed abroad.
We were in a new atmosphere and a new
world.  The war seemed already won, and the
work of renewal and reconstruction begun.

And now the summer had done for the
ground what the spring did for the trees.  One
Sunday, I was to hold a service on ground
that was, in the springtime, No Man's Land.
Having ample time I left the dusty road and
walked across the broken fields through which
our front-line trenches had run.  There were
innumerable shell holes and I had to pick my
way with care through the long grass and
lingering barbed wire.  I had been over the
ground on the day following the advance.
Then it was a sea of mud, with vast breakwaters
of rusty barbed wire.  Now, however,
Nature's healing hand was at work.  Slowly
but surely the trenches were falling in, and the
shell-holes filling up.  The lips of the craters
and trenches were red as a maiden's--red with
the poppies which come to them.  Here and
there were large patches of gold and white
where unseen hands had sown the mud with
dog-daisies.  There were other patches all
ablaze with the red fire of the poppies, and as
the slender plants swayed in the wind, the fire
leaped up or died down.

When the war broke out I was in "Poppyland"
near Cromer, in East Anglia.  There I
first heard the tramp of armed men on the way
to France, and there first caught the strain of
"Tipperary"--the farewell song of the First
Seven Divisions--a strain I can never hear
now without having to stifle back my tears.
As I passed by these patches of blood-red
poppies I thought of those old and stirring days
at Cromer when we watched a regiment of the
original Expeditionary Force singing
"Tipperary" as it marched swingingly through the
narrow streets.  The declaration of war was
hourly expected and the pier and some of the
Sunday-school rooms were given to the soldiers
for billets.  By morning every soldier had
vanished and we could only guess where, but
a remark made by one of them to another
lingers still.  They were standing apart, and
watching the fuss the people were making over
the regiment.

"Yes," he said to his comrade, "they think
a great deal of the soldiers in time of war,
but they don't think much of us in days of
peace."

The remark was so true that it cut like a
knife and the wound rankles yet.  I have often
wondered what became of the lad that went
out to France to the horrors of war, with such
memories of our attitude towards him in the
times of peace.  I hope he lived long enough
to see our repentance.  His memory haunted
me among the poppies of Beaurains.  In the
English Poppyland there was nothing to
compare with the red-coated army of poppies now
occupying our old front line.  In these trenches
our gallant men had for nearly three years
fought and bled, and it seemed as if every drop
of blood poured out by them had turned into
a glorious and triumphant poppy.

The spring and summer have taught me
afresh that there is in our lives a Power that
is not ourselves.  It is imminent in us and in
all things, yet transcends all.  "Change and
decay in all around we see," and still there is
One who changes not; He "*from* everlasting
*to* everlasting is God."  He is the fountain of
eternal life that no drought can touch.  He
heals the broken tree and the broken heart.
He clothes the desolate fields of war with the
golden corn of peace, and in the trenches that
war has scored across the souls of men, he
plants the rich poppies of memory.  He drives
away the icy oppression of winter with the
breath or spring, and in His mercy assuages
"the grief that saps the mind for those that
here we see no more."

He who turns rain-mists into rainbows and
brings out of mud scarlet poppies and
white-petaled daisies without a speck of dirt upon
them, is at work in human life.  Out of mud
He has formed the poppy and out of the dust
the body of man.  Who then can set Him
limits when He works in the finer material of
man's soul?  Eye hath not seen nor heart
conceived the beauty that will come forth when
His workmanship is complete.  "If God so
clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is,
and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He
not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith"
who were made for immortality?  His ways
are past finding out, but they are good.  He
puts out the sun but brings forth millions of
stars in its stead.  At His call they come
flocking forth as doves to their windows.  He
blinds Milton but brings into his soul a flood
of light such as never shone on sea or land,
and in its rays he sees Paradise, lost and
regained.  He shuts Bunyan in a noisome prison,
and closes against him the door to his beloved
Bedford, but He opens to him a magic window
that looks on heaven, and the years pass swiftly
as he watches the progress of the pilgrims
towards the Celestial City.  In the mud that
has been stained and even saturated with the
life-blood of our soldiers, He has made poppies
to spring to loveliness.  It is a parable He is
speaking to us, that the heart of man may feel
and believe that which it is beyond the power
of the mind to grasp, or the tongue to explain.

The wounds of France are deep and deadly
but they are not self-inflicted and they will heal.
She will blossom again with a glory greater
and purer than all her former glories.  She
is even now finding her soul, and revealing a
moral beauty and endurance such as few, even
of her dearest friends, could have foreseen or
foretold.  For ashes, God has given her beauty,
and it is worth all her suffering.  Not Voltaire,
but Joan of Arc is her pride to-day.  When
I was in Rouen I saw the fresh flowers which
the people daily place on the spot where she
died.  France knows where her strength lies.
Over Napoleon she has built a magnificent
tomb of marble, but in it, she has not placed
a single flower.  As I walked through it, some
time ago, I felt depressed.  It made me shiver.
It is magnificent, but dead.  One of Joan of
Arc's living flowers would be worth the whole
pile.  It is the most tremendous sermon ever
preached on the vanity of military glory and
the emptiness of genius when uninspired by
moral and spiritual worth.  France knows.
She gives Joan of Arc a flower, but Napoleon
a stone.  France was never so great as now,
and never of such supreme importance to the
world.  We could not do without her.  On her
coins she represents herself as a Sower that
goes forth sowing.  It is a noble ideal, and
truly, where she scatters her seeds of thought
the fair flowers of liberty, equality and
fraternity spring up as poppies spring, where the
blood of our soldiers has watered her fields.
France is the fair Sower among the nations, and
it will be our eternal glory that when she was
suddenly and murderously attacked in her fields
by her brutal and envious neighbor--who
shamelessly stamps a bird of prey on his coins
for *his* symbol, and a skull and cross-bones on
his soldiers' headgear as the expression of his
ambition--England came to her rescue, and
not in vain.  The German sword has gone
deeply into the heart of France, but it will leave
not a festering wound but a well of water at
which mankind will drink and be refreshed.
Wound the earth, and there springs forth
water; wound France and there springs forth
inspiration.  Trample France in the mud, and
she comes forth pure again, passionate and free
as a poppy blown by the summer wind.

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   *Printed in the United States of America*

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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   *By CHAPLAIN THOMAS TIPLADY*

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   *FIFTH EDITION*

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   The Cross at the Front

.. class:: center medium

   Fragments from the Trenches.

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   12mo.  Cloth.  *Net $1.00*.

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"'Vivid' is too dim a word to express
the living pictures which this chaplain has
seen in France.  Some of the chapters are
among the finest pieces of pathos we have
read anywhere.  Read the book and you
will be a better man for all your
tasks."--*Chicago Standard*.

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.. class:: center x-large bold

   The Soul of the Soldier

.. class:: center medium

   Echoes from the Western Front.

.. class:: center medium

   12mo.  Cloth.  *Net $1.25*.

.. vspace:: 1

An astonishing story Chaplain Tiplady
here has to tell--one in which the very
foundations of existence seem temporarily
uprooted, and the world turned upside-down.
Yet never, in the telling, does he lose the
unswerving faith and cheering optimism which
formed the prevailing note of THE CROSS
AT THE FRONT, nor for a moment relaxes his
belief that the cause of justice, truth and
righteousness is that for which the Allied
armies are now fighting.

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