They said, “All right,” and I began to give out the postcards.
I started at one end of the train and went on to the other end. In the
middle I found two carriages full of officers.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “will you please censor these postcards as I
collect them, and that will relieve the pressure on the local staff, for
I don’t want to put any extra work on them?”
“Oh, certainly,” they answered, and I sent a dozen or twenty up at a
time to them, and in fifteen minutes that train was steaming out of the
station and the boys were singing, “Should auld acquaintance.”
When they had gone I collected the postcards that had been written and
censored—and there were 575. To keep the boys in touch with home is
religion; to keep in their lives the finest, the most beautiful
home-sentiment that God ever gives to the world is a bit of
religion—pure and undefiled.
* * * * *
How gloriously brave are the French women and Belgian women! I was
talking to one in London—a young girl not more than eighteen or
nineteen. She was serving me in a restaurant, and I saw she was wiping
her eyes, so I called her to me and said, “What’s the matter, my child?”
She answered, “Sir, I came over on the boat from Belgium early in the
war, and my mother and sisters got scattered, and I have never seen or
heard of them since.”
And the Madame of the restaurant came to me a little while afterwards,
and said, “We dare not tell her, but they were all killed.”
Many people at home don’t realise what is going on. Some are in
mourning, some have lost boys, some have lost husbands, brothers, but we
have not suffered as others have suffered. I was riding in a French
train a few weeks ago. Beside me sat a lady draped in mourning. I could
not see her face, it was so thickly veiled with crape. Beside her was a
nurse, and the lady wept, oh, so bitterly! I cannot bear to see anybody
weeping. If I see a little child crying in the street I want to comfort
it. If I see a woman crying in the street I want to comfort her. God has
given me a quick ear where grief is concerned—and I am thankful. I
wouldn’t have it otherwise—though I have to pay for it.
That woman’s tears went through me. Every little while she was counting
in French, “Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq,”—then she would weep again
and then she would count.
I said to the nurse, “Nurse, what’s the trouble?” and she said, “Sir,
her mind has given way. Before the war she had five handsome sons, and
one by one they have been killed, and now she spends her time counting
over her boys and weeping.”
And all that is for you and for me! What sort of people ought we to be,
do you suppose? Are we really worth—_that_?
* * * * *
I was talking to some Canadians one night—and the Canadians are fine
boys. I was putting my foot on the platform, just about to begin, when a
bright young Canadian touched me and said, “Say, boss, can _you_ shoot
quick?” and I replied,
“Yes, and straight.”
“Well,” he said, “you’ll do.”
I had a great time with those fellows. Hundreds of those Canadian boys
stood up to say, “God helping me, I am going to lead a better
life!”—hundreds of them. And then I put another test to them. “I
want you all to promise,” I said, “that you’ll kneel down and say your
prayers to-night in the billet, and those of you who will promise to do
that come up and shake hands with me as you go out.” I was kept one
half-hour shaking hands.
Now, there were nine fellows sleeping in one billet and not one knew the
other eight had been to the meeting. They all got mixed up, but all the
nine came up to shake hands, and the one that got back to billets first
told the story afterwards. This one had made up his mind he would kneel
down and say his prayers, but when he returned he found there was no one
there. Somehow he felt different then—he felt he couldn’t do it. He was
more afraid of nobody than he would have been of somebody. Then just
suppose the others came back and found him kneeling there!
“I funked it,” he said. “I got under the blanket, and tried to say my
prayers under the blanket, but it wouldn’t work. Then I heard one man
come into the room, then two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight.
And the eighth man was the champion swearer of the company.”
“Boys,” said this man, “did you hear him?”
“Yes,” they said, “we heard him.”
And the little chap under the blanket said “Yes” too.
“Well, I shook hands with that man, and I promised him for my mother’s
sake that I’d kneel down and say my prayers to-night.”
And the little chap under the blanket jumped up, blanket and all, and
said, “So did I. I’m with you.”
And the others said, “So did we.”
“Well,” the last comer said, “the best thing we can do is to kneel down
now and say a little prayer.”
So they all knelt down, and they each said a little prayer—I wish I had
a record of those prayers—and they finished up with “Our Father.”
Then the champion swearer said, “Boys, I’ve cut it all out: no more
drink—not another drop.”
And they said, “All right, we are with you. We’ll cut it out.”
Then he said, “I’ve cut something else out. No more swearing.”
Eighty-five times out of every hundred that the boys in France use a
swear-word they mean no more than I do when I say, “Great Scott.”
“Do you, boys?” I ask them.
“No, sir,” they invariably reply.
“Well, then, why do you use these swear-words?”
And then I’ve got them and, out of their own mouths, they are condemned.
I tell them it is bad form, and I say, “Cut it out.”
These boys made a solemn compact that night that the first man who swore
should clean all nine guns, and before the week was out my champion was
cleaning nine guns.
But those eight boys didn’t go back on him. They were sporty.
I have seen a little bird’s nest all broken with the wind and torn with
the storm, and two or three little eggs, with a few wet leaves over
them, addled and cold and forsaken, and my little gipsy heart cried over
those poor little motherless things, for I was motherless too. And up in
a tree I have heard a thrush singing the song of a seraph and I have
said, as I looked at the eggs, “You would have been singers too, but you
were forsaken.”
These boys—they did not forsake their chum. They said, “Buck up, old
boy. We’ll help you.”
“No,” he said. “This is my job.”
So they stood by him and cheered him on. People, I say again, don’t die
of overmuch love, but for the want of a bit of it. These boys stood by
my champion swearer, and when he was putting the polishing touches on
the last gun he stood up, his face radiant, like a man that has fought a
battle and won: “Boys, this is the last gun I shall clean for anybody
under these conditions, because, God helping me, I’m going to see this
thing through.”
And he _is_ seeing it through.
* * * * *
I was at a home for limbless men the other day—there are over one
hundred and eighty of them in that home. I held my hand out to shake
hands with the first two men I met, and they laughed at me. I looked
down for their hands—they hadn’t got one between them! I took the face
of one of those dear boys and I patted it. I wanted to kiss it with
gratitude. I wonder how you feel!
I walked round amongst those boys—one hundred and eighty limbless! I
found one boy without legs and without an arm. He was just a trunk, and
his comrades, those who could, were carrying him around. He was the
sunshine in the whole place—not a grouse. They are doing no
grousing—your boys there. When they see you they just say, “Cheerio.”
A friend of mine, a minister, went to see one of these boys, and he was
wondering what he could say to him; he thought he had got to cheer him
up. The boy looked at the padre and said,
“Guv’nor, don’t get down-hearted. I am going to make money out of this
job. Why, I shall only want a pair of trousers with one leg, and I shall
only want a coat with one sleeve, and I shall only want a pair of boots
with one boot.”
It reminds me of the question I once asked: “Sonny, what struck you most
when you got in the trenches?” and the reply came sharp,
“A bit of shrapnel.”
Another of your boys, just picked up in the trenches by those tender
fellows, the stretcher-bearers, those men with the hands of a woman and
with the heart of a mother—God bless them!—called out as they came to
him, “_Home, John_.” And when he was passing the officer and they were
carrying him into the Red Cross train, he cried, “_Season_.” He had two
gold stripes already. That’s the spirit of your boys.
* * * * *
There was a dear old Scotchman from Aberdeen. A telegram had come to
that granite city to say that his boy was badly wounded, and he ran all
the way to the station and jumped into a train without stopping to put
on a collar. You don’t think of collars when your boys are dying. I saw
him when he landed. It was my job to help him. The dear old fellow was
just in time to see his boy die—and afterwards he came and laid his head
on my shoulder and he sobbed. And I wept too. He was seventy.
Presently he said, “It will be hard to go home and tell mother that her
only boy has gone, but I’ve got a message for her. ‘Father,’ my boy
said, ‘tell mother I am not afraid to die. I have found Jesus. Tell
mother that.’”
There are some people who think you are not doing Christian work unless
you have a hymn-book in one hand and a Bible in the other and are
singing, “Come to Jesus.” I am glad I haven’t to live with that kind of
people. I call them the Lord’s Awkward Squad.
If you take “firstly,” “secondly,” “thirdly,” out to the front with you,
by the time you get to thirdly the boys will be in the trenches. I never
take an old sermon out with me to France. I write my prescription after
I’ve seen my patients.
I was talking to a thousand boys one day. “Boys,” I said, “how many of
you have written to your mother this week?”
Now, that’s a proper question. I wonder what would happen if the
preacher stopped in his sermon next Sunday morning and said, “Have you
paid your debts this week?” “In what sort of a temper did you come down
to breakfast this morning?”
If a man’s religion does not get into every detail of his life he may
profess to be a saint, but he’s a fraud. Religion ought to permeate life
and make it beautiful—as lovely as a breath of perfume from the garden
of the Lord.
The boys have given me the privilege of talking straight to them. “If
you don’t write, you know what you’ll get,” I said, and I began to give
out the note-paper. I can give boys writing-paper and envelopes and sell
them a cup of coffee or a packet of cigarettes with as much religion as
I can stand in a pulpit and talk about them. Why, my Master washed
people’s feet and cooked a breakfast for hungry fishermen. He kindled
the fire with the hands that were nailed to a tree for humanity. There
are no secular things if you are in the spirit of the Master—they are
all Divine.
I went on dealing the note-paper out, and presently a clergyman came to
me and said, “Gipsy Smith, a man in my room wants to see you.”
When I got there, I saw he was crying, sobbing.
“I am not a kid,” he said; “I am a man. I’m forty-one. You told me to
write to my mother. Read that,” he said, throwing down a letter; and
this is what I read:
“My dear Mother,
“It’s seven years since I wrote you last. I’ve done my best to
break your heart and to turn your hair grey. I’ve lived a bad
life, but it’s come to an end. I have given my heart to God. I
won’t ask you to believe me, or to forgive me. I deserve
neither. But I ask for a bit of time that I may prove my
sincerity.
“Your boy still,
“Jack.”
“Shall I put a bit at the bottom for a postscript?” I asked. “But first
of all, let us pray.”
We got on our knees, and I said, “You begin.”
“I’m not used to it,” he replied.
“Begin; never mind how. Did you ever pray?”
“Yes,” he said; “I prayed as a child.”
“Start with that, then—He loves cradle faith.”
It took him some time, but presently he began with his mother’s prayer,
“Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me.” When he got to the third line there
was a big lump in his throat and one in mine, and then he gave me a dig
with his elbow and said, “You’ll have to finish”—and I finished.
I put my postscript to that letter. “God has saved him,” I wrote.
“Believe him. Write and tell him you forgive him.”
And when that mother got that she knew that giving out note-paper was
religion.
* * * * *
I was in a cemetery just behind the lines, walking among the graves of
our dear lads who have fallen, and weeping for those at home who weep
over graves that they will never see. There I found an old soldier who
had been to the woods and had cut a big bundle of box trimmings. He was
setting a little border of box round the graves.
“But,” I said to him, “they won’t strike. It’s not the right time of
year—and the ground’s too dry.”
“I know, sir,” he said, “but it will look as if somebody cares.”
God’s jewels lie deep, and if you will dig deep enough you will find
them—so I took the trouble to dig a little deeper. I said, “Nobody will
see them here.”
“Yes, sir, the angels will. You taught me to think like this in one of
the meetings in the huts, and since I can’t do any more in the
fight”—for he was disabled—“I am putting in my time caring for the
boys’ graves, and if the wives and mothers don’t see them—well”—and his
face lit up with a radiance that I can’t put into words—“the angels
will, sir.”
* * * * *
I have had your boys say to me, “Gipsy, does it mean Blighty, or does it
mean West?” I have had to say to some of them, “It doesn’t mean
Blighty.”
A sister took me to see one dear fellow. He was blown up by a mine, both
his legs and his arm were broken.
“I was lying out there, after the mine blew up, for twenty-four hours,
and I was half buried,” he told me.
Fancy lying out there in No Man’s Land for twenty-four hours with both
legs broken and an arm!