_A TALE OF TWO CHRISTIANS IN FRANCE_
He was called the "Count." How he came by the name, and who christened
him, I do not know. At home he is a travelling salesman. I saw him
first with an odoriferous pipe between his teeth and a week's growth
of beard on his face, standing in the doorway of a Y. M. C. A.
secretaries' mess at the headquarters city for the First American
Division--the first division permanently in the line on the western
front. He was short and stocky, with the face of an Irish fishing-smack
captain and a cough that sounded like the fog-horn off Nantucket Light.
I liked him instantly--liked him in spite of his pipe. Men who worked
with him all swore by him. He was one of the key men of the fifty-two
who under the leadership of a great-hearted and tremendously efficient
Ohio business man were carrying the work of the Y. M. C. A. through
the vital experimental stages, directly behind and within the fighting
lines on one of our sectors in France.
His particular job was hut-building, and as superintendent of
as nondescript a crew of carpenters as ever drove a nail he had
already raised a dozen or more shelters under the menace of constant
shell-fire; and when I saw those shelters they were keeping out the
weather and housing a thousand comforts for twelve thousand soldiers.
Among those who knew him it was the consensus of opinion that he was a
short man because so much material had been used in making his heart.
His body was constantly under the whip of his sympathies. Far into the
night his "camionette" searched the road for stragglers. Often he tore
the blankets from his own bed to supply a man whose experience with
French wines had been disastrous, and who would have been put into the
guard-house had the "Count" not given him shelter under the cover of
his light truck.
He had been on the job for weeks when I met him, but his ardor was as
intense as when he began. "Why try to sleep when slumber only brings
visions of bedraggled lads who need friendly rooms, warming fires,
writing-tables, talking-machines, red-hot drinks, and the comradeship
and sympathy of the Y. M. C. A. secretaries?" This was his question
for all interested friends who tried to give him advice as to his own
welfare. He religiously blasphemed his laryngitis, flagrantly disobeyed
his considerate chief, and for hours broke every rule that the
American Federation of Labor has ever indorsed.
He celebrated the last Sabbath of my association with him by persuading
a United Presbyterian minister to work all day on a Y. M. C. A. hut
for four hundred drivers of supply and ammunition trucks, who were
quartered in a desolate forest miles from every comfort. By putting in
the entire Sunday he gave those men a warm room in the evening. The
"Count's" tired face was unusually attractive as he stood eating his
late supper that night, and his ministerial friend looked as if he had
a fuller understanding of the text, "The Sabbath was made for men."
A few hours before I left this division the "Count" brought me a
Testament, and said, "Doc, I'm not in your line; but there's no telling
when I will 'get mine' out along the road somewhere. Suppose you mark
my book up; hit the places you know that have the stuff, and I'll
be obliged." I "marked it up" a bit, and put a line or two on the
title-page, and left it for him. He was away before I had finished. I
am not sure that we said, "Good-by"; at any rate, we have not separated.
The "Count's" words do not always do him justice. The tobacco he smokes
is not of a fancy brand. Theologically he is hard to locate; but he
is an unassuming, unequivocating follower of the "Inasmuch," and a
two-handed man of the Christ.
"Smith" was altogether different; tall and shallow-chested, thin of
face and red-headed, he looked every drop of the Scotch that flowed
unmixed in his veins. He was a "graduated" British Tommy. One lung was
gone, and the rest of him had been so badly used in the blowing-up of a
sap-head that the hospital judges refused to give him another chance to
die for his country in the trenches.
He was one of the immortal "First Hundred Thousand," the glorious
"Contemptibles" who fought from Mons to the Marne, the mightiest
rear-guard action known in the history of wars. He was one of those who
suffered the horrors of gas in front of Ypres. But he could not rest
in London--rest there with his wife and babies, rest there with his
laurels. Across the Channel the cause of his race still trembled in the
balance, and it was thither that his heart commanded him.
When the army refused him absolutely, he finally secured a position as
an automobile-driver with the American Y. M. C. A.; and so he carried
me from an ancient city in Brittany to a great barrack camp established
by Napoleon, but now filled with American artillery in training.
The judgment of his associates would warm his kindly heart if he
could hear the words with which they told me his story. The hacking,
deep-seated cough that racks him is more than the evidence of his
torture. To those who have heard it and who know him it is the token
of a higher heroism than that with which he tunnelled under the enemy's
lines or faced the shock of their attack.
As I watched him disappear among the French soldiers bound for the
front, who crowded the station on the night when I took my departure,
the words of another soldier came to me: "He that endureth to the end
shall be saved."