Your Boys | Page 9

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,