to all those who are to
know a grief such as I knew. Every mother and father who loves a son
in this war must have a strong, unbreakable faith in the future life,
in the world beyond, where you will see your son again. Do not give
way to grief. Instead, keep your gaze and your faith firmly fixed on
the world beyond, and regard your boy's absence as though he were but
on a journey. By keeping your faith you will help to win this war.
For if you lose it, the war and your personal self are lost.

My whole perspective was changed by my visit to the front. Never
again shall I know those moments of black despair that used to come
to me. In my thoughts I shall never be far away from the little
cemetery hard by the Bapaume road. And life would not be worth the
living for me did I not believe that each day brings me nearer to
seeing him again.

I found a belief among the soldiers in France that was almost
universal. I found it among all classes of men at the front; among
men who had, before the war, been regularly religious, along
well-ordered lines, and among men who had lived just according to
their own lights. Before the war, before the Hun went mad, the young
men of Britain thought little of death or what might come after death.
They were gay and careless, living for to-day. Then war came, and with
it death, astride of every minute, every hour. And the young men began
to think of spiritual things and of God.

Their faces, their deportments, may not have shown the change. But it
was in their hearts. They would not show it. Not they! But I have
talked with hundreds of men along the front. And it is my conviction
that they believe, one and all, that if they fall in battle they only
pass on to another. And what a comforting belief that is!

"It is that belief that makes us indifferent to danger and to death,"
a soldier said to me. "We fight in a righteous cause and a holy war.
God is not going to let everything end for us just because the mortal
life quits the shell we call the body. You may be sure of that."

And I am sure of it, indeed!

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Minstrel In France, by Harry Lauder

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