So, also with the lads who drive the ambulance cars. I have felt
my heart fill as I watched them bringing in the wounded. Gently as
a mother carrying a sick child in her bosom, they creep with their
agonized burdens over the rough roads, calculating every inequality,
thinking through every stage of the journey. I remember, at midnight,
standing by one that had just been brought in. The first to be lifted
out on a stretcher was a fine fellow, an Irishman, with his right arm
blown off. The doctor, with his lantern, leaned over and asked his name.
But the suffering man looked up in his face and said, "Sir, before we
do anything, please thank the driver. He's a Christian and a gentleman."
The common sorrow of the allied nations binds them very tenderly
together. I used to see a fine expression of this in the town where I
was first stationed, where some women who had a garden, on the way to
the cemetery, were wont to do a very beautiful thing. As, almost daily,
the heavy lumbering wagons with the dead came rolling along, those
kindly hearts came out and laid on each coffin, above the Union Jack,
a bouquet of exquisite flowers. Then the wagons rumbled on toward the
graves. It was a sweet tribute to the brave strangers who are fighting
in France, so many of them giving their all in sacrifice for liberty,
love, and home in this hideous uprising of all that was monstrous in
the dark ages that are past.
One perhaps learns most by unlearning. I used to think of the spirit
of pain as intensely, even immensely, vocal. I remember, especially,
when I was young, a great gully in the north, beside the sea, up which
the waves came dashing in perpetually recurrent warfare, the flood
seeking ever higher, only to be drawn away down the sloping shingle
again, shrieking, to the main. Often in the daytime I would listen,
and, in the dark, would linger near, held by the awe of the unsleeping
tragedy of that vast elemental grief which sways about the edges of
the world. I told my heart, "This is the spirit of the world pain
finding voice." But now I know otherwise. I have learned better in
the school of suffering, in the land of war. The spirit of pain is
silent--tholing, at its deepest. It looks at you out of those suffering
eyes. There is no cry in it. For the mystery of duty is within its
depths. The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is its truest picture. So
it comes to be that the nobility and manliness of the brave combine,
with unforgettable splendour of ineffable beauty, the darkness of our
times. When they do speak there is a majesty of stillness about their
utterance, vast as the mid-deep, far away, out under the stars.
The lads are uplifted by the nearness of the Unseen. I have before me
two genuine documents, letters of two fine boys who went godward up the
highway of the sun--the way of sacrifice. They speak for themselves.
No novelist's imagination could create so fine an utterance. One was
scribbled in the trenches, the other in the hospital ward, to those who
had the best claim on the best the writers had to give. Said one:
"I am in the trenches, and in half an hour we go over the top. Our
artillery is going at it hammer and tongs, the biggest bombardment in
English history. It is just like huge express trains rushing through
the air in hundreds. All of us are happy in the prospect of a clean
fight after so many weary months as passive spectators of anything but
warfare, except on rare occasions. If I get through all right I shall
add a postscript to this. If not, mother dear, I know you will not be
beaten by a Spartan mother who had no heavenly Father revealed to her
to look to for comfort, but yet could say, 'Come back with victory, or
not at all.' With heaps of love. * * *"
The other is suffused with the same straightforward spirit of
fearlessness and faith.
"I was so glad to see your answer this morning, but am sorry I have
not enough strength to write much. A good few died of wounds in this
hospital through weakness, but I am leaving all doubts with God, as He
holds the key of all the Unknown, and I am glad. So if I die before
long, and I cannot see anything more sure, I hope to meet you all in
God's good time. My wound is numb. It is in my thigh, and I have no
pain. * * * I am now at the balance, to live or die. So good day, and
God bless all. * * *"
There was nothing really extraordinary about these boys among their
fellows. But one is struck by the frequency with which the men, after a
deep emotion, touch literature in their letters. Of course the secret
of true style lies in a real experience. Some of them, it is true, tell
absolutely false tales, and their letters are sentimental poses. But
of the letters of dying men there can be no mistake, and these boys
wrote these on the threshold of the eternal mystery. They are types
of a large proportion of the army of to-day, fighting, suffering, and
dying as those who have looked in the face of the Invisible, and are
inheriting the promise, "Be thou faithful unto death and I will give
thee a crown of life." It is surely an incentive to the people at home,
for honour and remembrance.