*PREFACE*
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."