Chapter 2

I was talking behind the lines to some of your boys. Every boy in front of me was going up to the trenches that night. There were five or six hundred of them. They had got their equipment—they were going on parade as soon as they left me. It wasn’t easy to talk. All I said was accompanied by the roar of the guns and the crack of rifles and the rattle of the machine guns, and once in a while our faces were lit up by the flashes. It was a weird sight. I looked at those boys. I couldn’t preach to them in the ordinary way. I knew and they knew that for many it was the last service they would attend on earth. I said,

“Boys, you are going up to the trenches. Anything may happen there. I wish I could go with you. God knows I do. I would if they would let me, and if any of you fall I would like to hold your hand and say something to you for mother, for wife, and for lover, and for little child. I’d like to be a link between you and home just for _that_ moment—God’s messenger for you. They won’t let me go, but there is Somebody Who will go with you. You know Who that is.”

You should have heard the boys all over that hut whisper, “Yes, sir—Jesus.”

“Well,” I said, “I want every man that is anxious to take Jesus with him into the trench to stand.”

Instantly and quietly every man in that hut stood up. And we prayed as men can pray only under those conditions. We sang together, “For ever with the Lord.” I shall never sing that hymn again without a lump in my throat. My mind will always go back to those dear boys.

We shook hands and I watched them go, and then on my way to the little cottage where I was billeted I heard feet coming behind me, and presently felt a hand laid upon my shoulder. Two grand handsome fellows stood beside me. One of them said,

“We didn’t manage to get into the hut, but we stood at the window to your right. We heard all you said. We want you to pray for us. We are going into the trenches, too. We can’t go until it is settled.”

We prayed together, and then I shook hands with them and bade them good-bye. They did not come back. Some of their comrades came—those two, with others, were left behind. But they had settled it—_they had settled it_.

* * * * *

Two or three days after that I was in a hospital when one was brought in who was at that service. I thought he was unconscious, and I said to the Sister beside me, “Sister, how battered and bruised his poor head is!”

He looked up and said, “Yes, it is battered and bruised; but it will be all right, Gipsy, when I get the crown!”

One night I had got about fifty boys round me in a dug-out, with the walls blown out and bits of the roof off. I had taken some hymn-sheets, for I love to hear them sing. I never choose a hymn for them—I always let them choose their own hymns. There is wisdom in that. If they have asked for something and don’t sing it, I can come down on them. Among the great hymns they choose are these:

“Jesu, Lover of my soul,”

and I have heard them sing,

“Cover my defenceless head,”

with the shells falling close to them. I have heard them sing,

“I fear no foe ...”

with every seat and every bit of building round us rocking with the concussion of things. And then they will choose:

“The King of Love my Shepherd is,” “The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want,” “Abide with me,” “Rock of ages, cleft for me,”

and the one they love, I think, most of all is,

“When I survey the wondrous Cross.”

Those are the hymns they sing, the great hymns of the Church—the hymns that all Christian people sing, about which there is no quarrelling. It’s beautiful to hear the boys.

That night I said, “I have brought some hymn-sheets. I thought we might have some singing, but I’m afraid it’s too dark.”

Instantly one of the boys brought out of his tunic about two inches of candle and struck a match, and in three minutes we had about twenty pieces of candle burning. It was a weird scene.

After the hymns I began to talk, and the candles burnt lower, and some of them flickered out, and I could see a boy here and there twitch a bit of candle as it was going out.

I said, “Put the candles out, boys. I can talk in the dark.”

It was a wonderful service, and here and there you could hear the boys sighing and crying as they thought of home and father and mother. It isn’t difficult to talk to boys like that.

* * * * *

There is no hymn of hate in your boys’ hearts. I have known them take a German prisoner even after he has played the cruel thing; but there! he looked hungry and wretched, and in a few minutes they have shared their rations and cigarettes with him. I call that a bit of religion breaking out in an unlikely place. The leaven’s in the lump, thank God!

* * * * *

I was speaking at a convalescent camp. Every one of the boys had been badly mauled and mangled on the Somme. This particular day I had about seven or eight hundred listeners. It was evening, and when I had talked to the boys, I said,

“I wonder if any of you would like to meet me for a little prayer?”

And from all over the camp came the answer, “Yes, sir; yes, sir; yes, sir.”

There was a big room there—we called it a quiet room—and so I asked all the boys who would like to see me, just to leave their seats and go into this room. I went to them and said,

“You have elected to come here to pray, so we will just kneel down at once. I am not going to do anything more than guide you. I want you to tell God what you feel you need in your own language.”

The prayers of those boys would have made a book. There were no old-fashioned phrases. You know what I mean—people begin at a certain place and there is no stopping them till they get to another certain place. One of these boys began, “Please God, You know I’ve been a rotter.” That’s the way to pray. That boy was talking to God and the Lord was very glad to listen.

* * * * *

I was talking to one boy—an American; he was a little premature, he was in the fight before his country.

“Sonny,” I said, “you’re an American?”

“Yes, sir. I was born in Michigan.”

“Well, what are you doing, fighting under the British flag?”

“I guess it’s my fight too, sir. This,” he said, “is not a fight for England, France, or Belgium, but a fight for the race, and I wouldn’t have been a man if I had kept out.”

I told that story to one of our Generals who died last September.

“Ah!” he said, “that boy got to the bottom of the business. It’s for the race. It’s for the race.”

“Are you a Christian?” I asked.

“No,” he answered; “but I should like to be one. I wasn’t brought up. I grew up, and I grew up my own way, and my own way was the wrong way. I go to church occasionally—if a friend is getting married. I know the story of the Christian faith a little, but it has never really meant anything to me.”

Then he continued slowly, “On the Somme, a few hours before I was badly wounded”—he put his hand in his pocket and drew out a little crucifix—“I picked up that little crucifix and I put it in my pack, and when I got to hospital I found that little crucifix on my table. One of the nurses or the orderlies had put it there, thinking I was a Catholic. But I know I’m not, sir. I am _nothing_. I have been looking at this little crucifix so often since I was wounded, and I look at it till my eyes fill with tears, because it reminds me of what He did for me—not this little bit of metal, but what it means.”

I said, “Have you ever prayed?”

He replied, “No, sir. I’ve wept over this little crucifix—is that prayer?”

“That’s prayer of the best sort,” I said. “Every tear contained volumes you could not utter, and God read every word. He knows all about it.”

I pulled out a little khaki Testament. “Would you like it?” I said. “Would you read it?”

He answered, “Yes,” and signed the decision in the cover.

When I shook hands with him there was a light in his eyes. Have you ever seen the light break over the cliff-tops of some high mountain peak? Have you ever watched the sun kiss a landscape into beauty? Have you ever seen the earth dance with gladness as the sun bathed it with radiance and warmth? Oh, it’s a great sight; but there’s no sight like seeing the light from Calvary kiss a human face as it fills the heart with the assurance of Divine forgiveness.

* * * * *

One hundred and fifty-two thousand cups of tea and coffee are given away monthly at one railway-station. I once happened to be at a railway-station on the main lines of communication. There are women working there, women of position and means, working at their own expense. I have seen rough fellows go up to a British woman behind a counter—the first time they have seen a British woman for months—and I have heard them say, “Madam, will you shake hands with me?” I saw an Australian do that. He got her hand—and his was like a leg of mutton—and he thought of his mother and his home-folk. He forgot his tea. It was a benediction to have that woman there.

Well, on this occasion two of these ladies said to me, “Gipsy, we’re having a relief train pass through to-morrow, and one comes through up and one comes through down.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

The train that was coming from the front we could hear before we could see it. And it wasn’t the engine that we heard, because that came so slowly, but I could hear the boys singing as they came round the curve,

“Blighty, Blighty is the place for me.”

We served them with tea and coffee, French bread a yard long, and candles and matches and “Woodbines,” and then we got that crowd off—still singing “Blighty.”

They had been gone about five minutes when the other train _from_ Blighty came in. We couldn’t hear them singing. They were quiet and subdued. We served them with coffee and tea, candles, bootlaces, and smokes, and then, as they had some time, they started having a wash—the first since they left Blighty. The footboard of the train was the washstand, the shaving-table, and the dressing-table. But they didn’t sing.

I saw in a corner of that little canteen a pile of postcards, and I said, “Who says a postcard for wife or mother?”

Somebody asked, “Who’s going to see them posted?”

I said, “I am. You leave them to me.”

They said, “All right,” and I began to give out the postcards.

I started at one end of the train and went on to the other end. In the middle I found two carriages full of officers.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “will you please censor these postcards as I 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, blanket and all, and said, “So did I. I’m with you.”

And the others said, “So did we.”

“Well,” the last comer said, “the best thing we can do is to kneel down now and say a little prayer.”

So they all knelt down, and they each said a little prayer—I wish I had a record of those prayers—and they finished up with “Our Father.”

Then the champion swearer said, “Boys, I’ve cut it all out: no more drink—not another drop.”

And they said, “All right, we are with you. We’ll cut it out.”

Then he said, “I’ve cut something else out. No more swearing.”

Eighty-five times out of every hundred that the boys in France use a swear-word they mean no more than I do when I say, “Great Scott.”

“Do you, boys?” I ask them.

“No, sir,” they invariably reply.

“Well, then, why do you use these swear-words?”

And then I’ve got them and, out of their own mouths, they are condemned. I tell them it is bad form, and I say, “Cut it out.”

These boys made a solemn compact that night that the first man who swore should clean all nine guns, and before the week was out my champion was cleaning nine guns.

But those eight boys didn’t go back on him. They were sporty.

I have seen a little bird’s nest all broken with the wind and torn with the storm, and two or three little eggs, with a few wet leaves over them, addled and cold and forsaken, and my little gipsy heart cried over those poor little motherless things, for I was motherless too. And up in a tree I have heard a thrush singing the song of a seraph and I have said, as I looked at the eggs, “You would have been singers too, but you were forsaken.”

These boys—they did not forsake their chum. They said, “Buck up, old boy. We’ll help you.”

“No,” he said. “This is my job.”

So they stood by him and cheered him on. People, I say again, don’t die of overmuch love, but for the want of a bit of it. These boys stood by my champion swearer, and when he was putting the polishing touches on the last gun he stood up, his face radiant, like a man that has fought a battle and won: “Boys, this is the last gun I shall clean for anybody under these conditions, because, God helping me, I’m going to see this thing through.”

And he _is_ seeing it through.

* * * * *

I was at a home for limbless men the other day—there are over one hundred and eighty of them in that home. I held my hand out to shake hands with the first two men I met, and they laughed at me. I looked down for their hands—they hadn’t got one between them! I took the face of one of those dear boys and I patted it. I wanted to kiss it with gratitude. I wonder how you feel!

I walked round amongst those boys—one hundred and eighty limbless! I found one boy without legs and without an arm. He was just a trunk, and his comrades, those who could, were carrying him around. He was the sunshine in the whole place—not a grouse. They are doing no grousing—your boys there. When they see you they just say, “Cheerio.”

A friend of mine, a minister, went to see one of these boys, and he was wondering what he could say to him; he thought he had got to cheer him up. The boy looked at the padre and said,

“Guv’nor, don’t get down-hearted. I am going to make money out of this job. Why, I shall only want a pair of trousers with one leg, and I shall only want a coat with one sleeve, and I shall only want a pair of boots with one boot.”

It reminds me of the question I once asked: “Sonny, what struck you most when you got in the trenches?” and the reply came sharp,

“A bit of shrapnel.”

Another of your boys, just picked up in the trenches by those tender fellows, the stretcher-bearers, those men with the hands of a woman and with the heart of a mother—God bless them!—called out as they came to him, “_Home, John_.” And when he was passing the officer and they were carrying him into the Red Cross train, he cried, “_Season_.” He had two gold stripes already. That’s the spirit of your boys.

* * * * *

There was a dear old Scotchman from Aberdeen. A telegram had come to that granite city to say that his boy was badly wounded, and he ran all the way to the station and jumped into a train without stopping to put on a collar. You don’t think of collars when your boys are dying. I saw him when he landed. It was my job to help him. The dear old fellow was just in time to see his boy die—and afterwards he came and laid his head on my shoulder and he sobbed. And I wept too. He was seventy.

Presently he said, “It will be hard to go home and tell mother that her only boy has gone, but I’ve got a message for her. ‘Father,’ my boy said, ‘tell mother I am not afraid to die. I have found Jesus. Tell mother that.’”

There are some people who think you are not doing Christian work unless you have a hymn-book in one hand and a Bible in the other and are singing, “Come to Jesus.” I am glad I haven’t to live with that kind of people. I call them the Lord’s Awkward Squad.

If you take “firstly,” “secondly,” “thirdly,” out to the front with you, by the time you get to thirdly the boys will be in the trenches. I never take an old sermon out with me to France. I write my prescription after I’ve seen my patients.

I was talking to a thousand boys one day. “Boys,” I said, “how many of you have written to your mother this week?”

Now, that’s a proper question. I wonder what would happen if the preacher stopped in his sermon next Sunday morning and said, “Have you paid your debts this week?” “In what sort of a temper did you come down to breakfast this morning?”

If a man’s religion does not get into every detail of his life he may profess to be a saint, but he’s a fraud. Religion ought to permeate life and make it beautiful—as lovely as a breath of perfume from the garden of the Lord.

The boys have given me the privilege of talking straight to them. “If you don’t write, you know what you’ll get,” I said, and I began to give out the note-paper. I can give boys writing-paper and envelopes and sell them a cup of coffee or a packet of cigarettes with as much religion as I can stand in a pulpit and talk about them. Why, my Master washed people’s feet and cooked a breakfast for hungry fishermen. He kindled the fire with the hands that were nailed to a tree for humanity. There are no secular things if you are in the spirit of the Master—they are all Divine.

I went on dealing the note-paper out, and presently a clergyman came to me and said, “Gipsy Smith, a man in my room wants to see you.”

When I got there, I saw he was crying, sobbing.

“I am not a kid,” he said; “I am a man. I’m forty-one. You told me to write to my mother. Read that,” he said, throwing down a letter; and this is what I read:

“My dear Mother,

“It’s seven years since I wrote you last. I’ve done my best to break your heart and to turn your hair grey. I’ve lived a bad life, but it’s come to an end. I have given my heart to God. I won’t ask you to believe me, or to forgive me. I deserve neither. But I ask for a bit of time that I may prove my sincerity.

“Your boy still, “Jack.”

“Shall I put a bit at the bottom for a postscript?” I asked. “But first of all, let us pray.”

We got on our knees, and I said, “You begin.”

“I’m not used to it,” he replied.

“Begin; never mind how. Did you ever pray?”

“Yes,” he said; “I prayed as a child.”

“Start with that, then—He loves cradle faith.”

It took him some time, but presently he began with his mother’s prayer, “Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me.” When he got to the third line there was a big lump in his throat and one in mine, and then he gave me a dig with his elbow and said, “You’ll have to finish”—and I finished.

I put my postscript to that letter. “God has saved him,” I wrote. “Believe him. Write and tell him you forgive him.”

And when that mother got that she knew that giving out note-paper was religion.

* * * * *

I was in a cemetery just behind the lines, walking among the graves of our dear lads who have fallen, and weeping for those at home who weep over graves that they will never see. There I found an old soldier who had been to the woods and had cut a big bundle of box trimmings. He was setting a little border of box round the graves.

“But,” I said to him, “they won’t strike. It’s not the right time of year—and the ground’s too dry.”

“I know, sir,” he said, “but it will look as if somebody cares.”

God’s jewels lie deep, and if you will dig deep enough you will find them—so I took the trouble to dig a little deeper. I said, “Nobody will see them here.”

“Yes, sir, the angels will. You taught me to think like this in one of the meetings in the huts, and since I can’t do any more in the fight”—for he was disabled—“I am putting in my time caring for the boys’ graves, and if the wives and mothers don’t see them—well”—and his face lit up with a radiance that I can’t put into words—“the angels will, sir.”

* * * * *