I came in contact with many wounded French
soldiers, men who had gone to the front as atheists and returned firm
believers. "Thank the good God I have really seen. I fell wounded in
twenty-three places they tell me. I fell cursing a God I did not believe
in: then a cold hand was laid upon my brow. I looked up and saw--ah! my
God! how beautiful a Being. Now I do not want, I do not care to live for
I want to see that beautiful Being again. I know I shall. Leave me. See
to the others." This was a voluntary statement of a French soldier who
called me to his side simply to light a cigarette for him. I left him
perfectly happy and it was quite true about his number of wounds. He
lived only a few hours and he knew that he was dying. Men do not usually
tell lies on their death beds.

Wonderful is the warp and woof of life under fire. It is the parade of
the living, the dead and those on the borderland. Men go through the
whole gamut of emotions. War is an object lesson of laughter and tears
playing hide and seek with each other. The tragedy and the comedy follow
close on each other's heels. Deep calls not only to deep but to shallow
as well, and in the end all notes harmonize. Where the swathe of the
scythe is wide men's souls expand in heart qualities. Amidst the
wreckage of a battlefield he picks up all kinds of things, every faculty
picks up something and they become contributions to soul force. The
greater the gloom the more the soldier searches for the gleam. Religion
and resolution meet in the soldier and give him deeper vision. He hears
his comrade say, "I shall be taken to-day, give this to ----." Examples
of this premonition abound. He enters a bombarded village, the only
thing standing intact frequently is a figure of Christ crucified, or the
Madonna looking down upon a mass of crumbling ruin. These facts are
again and again verified by photographs. Often the talk of the camp as
the men settle down by the fire is of the weird and the uncanny that
has happened during the day; and there are pauses when the soldiers
stare into the embers and forget to suck their pipes.

To explain the book of life, one would require the scrolls of eternity.
War throws light on some of its stray pages as they flutter for a second
on the wings of time and then disappear, but not before it has flung its
cressets of light upon the black pall of doubt. Everyone now talks of
psychic phenomena. In a paltry generation of superficial thinking th