I have received from the front one of the respirators
given out to the troops to be used when the gas clouds
appear.
“It is prepared with hypophosphite of soda,”
wrote the surgeon who sent it, “and all they
have to do before putting it on is to dip it in the
water in the trenches. They are all supplied in
addition with goggles, which are worn on their caps,”
This is from the same letter:
“That night a German soldier was brought in
wounded, and jolly glad he was to be taken. He
told us he had been turned down three times for phthisis—tuberculosis—and
then in the end was called up and put into the trenches
after eight weeks’ training. All of which
is very significant. Another wounded German told
the men at the ambulance that they must move on as
soon as they could, as very soon the Germans would
be in Calais.
“All the German soldiers write home now on the
official cards, which have Calais printed on the top
of them!”
Not all. I have before me a card from a German
officer in the trenches in France. It is a good-natured
bit of raillery, with something of grimness underneath.
“Dear Madame:
“’I nibble them’—Joffre.
See your article in the Saturday Evening
Post of May 29th, 1915.
Really, Joffre has had time! It is
September now, and we are
not nibbled yet. Still we stand deep in
France. Au revoir a Paris,
Madame.”
He signs it “Yours truly,” and then his
name.
Not Calais, then, but Paris!
AN ARMY OF CHILDREN
It is undeniably true that the humanities are failing
us as the war goes on. Not, thank God, the broad
humanity of the Red Cross, but that individual compassion
of a man for his wounded brother, of which the very
fabric of mercy is woven. There is too much death,
too much suffering. Men grow calloused.
As yet the loss is not irretrievable, but the war
is still only a matter of months. What if it is
to be of years?
France and Belgium were suffering from a wave of atheism
before the war. But there comes a time in the
existence of nations, as in the lives of individuals,
when human endeavour seems useless, when the world
and the things thereof have failed. At such time
nations and individuals alike turn at last to a Higher
Power. France is on her knees to-day. Her
churches are crowded. Not perhaps since the days
of chivalry, when men were shriven in the churches
before going out to battle, has France so generally
knelt and bowed her head—but it is to the
God of Battles that she prays.
On her battlefields the priests have most signally
distinguished themselves. Some have exchanged
the soutane for the uniform, and have fought bravely
and well. Others, like the priests who stood firm
in the midst of Jordan, have carried their message
of hope to the dying into the trenches.
