Letters from France | Page 2

far, far
away over the brim of the world. "S.O.S.," it ran, "S.O.S." There
followed half inarticulate fragments of a latitude. That evening about
sundown we ran into the shreds of some ocean conversation about
boats' crews, and about someone who was still absent--just that broken
fragment in the buzz of the wireless conversation which runs around
the world. A big Australian transport, we knew, was some twelve hours
away from us upon the waters. Could it be about her that these
personages of the ocean were calling one to another? Days afterwards
we heard that it had not been an Australian or any other transport.
Somewhere in those dazzling seas there was an eye watching for us too,

just above the water, and always waiting--waiting--waiting--. It would
have been a rich harvest, that crowded deck below one. If the monster
struck just there he could not fail to kill many with the mere explosion.
But I don't believe a man in the crowd gave it a thought. The strong,
tanned, clean-shaven faces under the old slouch hats were all gazing up
in rapt attention at the speaker. For he was telling them the right thing.
He was not a regular chaplain--there was no regular padre in that ship,
and we were likely to have no church parade until there was discovered
amongst the reinforcement officers one little subaltern who was a padre
in Tasmania, but who was going to the front as a fighting man. We had
heard other padres speak to troops on the eve of their plunging into a
great enterprise, when the sermon had made some of us wish that we
only had the power and gift to seize that wonderful opportunity as it
might be seized, and have done with texts and doctrines and speak to
the men as men. Every man there had his ideals--he was giving his life,
as like as not, because, however crude the exterior, there was an eye
within which saw truly and surely through the mists. And now when
they stood on the brink of the last great sacrifice, could he not seize
upon those truths--?
But this time we simply stood and wondered. For that slip of a figure in
khaki, high up there with one hand on the stanchion and the other
tapping the rail, was telling them a thousand times better than any of us
could ever have put it to himself exactly the things one would have
longed to say.
He told them first, his voice firm with conviction, that God had not
populated this world with saints, but with ordinary human men; and
that they need not fear that, simply because they might not have been
churchgoers or lived what the world calls religious lives, therefore God
would desert them in the danger and trials and perhaps the death to
which they went. "If I thought that God wished any man to be tortured
eternally," he said, "to be tortured for all time and not to have any hope
of heaven, then I would go down to Hell cheerfully with a smile on my
lips rather than worship such a being. I don't know whether a man may
put it beyond the power of God to help him. But I know this, that

whether you are bad or good, or religious or not religious, God is with
you all the time trying to help you.
"And what have we to fear now?" he went on, raising his eyes for a
moment from the puckered, interested brown foreheads below him and
looking out over the shimmering distant silver of the horizon, as if
away over there, over the edge of the world, he could read what the
next few months had in store for them. "We know what we have come
for, and we know that it is right. We have all read of the things which
have happened in Belgium and in France. We know that the Germans
invaded a peaceful country and brought these horrors into it, we know
how they tore up treaties like so much paper; how they sank the
Lusitania and showered their bombs on harmless women and children
in London and in the villages of England. We came of our own free
wills--we came to say that this sort of thing shall not happen in the
world so long as we are in it. We know that we are doing right, and I
tell you that on this mission on which we have come, so long as every
man plays the game and plays it cleanly, he need not fear about his
religion--for what else is his religion than that? Play the game and God
will be with you--never fear.
"And what if some of us do pass over before this