HOW STRONG MEN DIE—TALES OF THE WOUNDED
Experiences of a Scottish Minister
Told by Rev. Lauchlan Maclean Watt, Minister of St. Stephen's, Edinburgh
The courage of the Scots is one of the epics of the Great War. An insight into their strong character may be seen by this minister's story to The Scotsman, revealing the pathos and fortitude of men on their death-beds.
I—STORY OF THE MINISTER AT THE DEATH-BED
It is truly a great thing to see that the day of willing devotion to the noblest ideals is not yet gone from the life of our people. Suffering and death are faced without repining, and men say farewell to the promise of their youth ungrudgingly, feeling that the investment for the sake of the future of the world is worth the cost which they are paying. To the greatest life and death are very simple alternatives, lying easily to either hand, accepted without complaining.
One day I was going through a tent of suffering men just after a big "stunt." It was a day of much and great agony for those who were in actual bodily pain and for those of us who had to try to help them to endure it. I saw two men carried in and laid on beds side by side with each other. One was obviously very severely wounded. The other was swathed in bandages over his head and down over his face, apparently blinded. For a moment I hesitated, thinking it might be better to come back when, perhaps, the agonies of the one might be somewhat abated. But I put my hesitation aside. I found that the two men were brothers who, fighting in the same trench, had been struck down by the same shell. Late that evening an ambulance came for me as a man was dying, and I found it was the soldier I had spoken to earlier in the day.
The camp lay beautifully still, for the clouds were heavy and the stars were veiled. I stepped into the tent, into the breathing dark. The beds were swathed in shadow, only one red lamp hanging from a central post.
They had brought the brothers quite closely together, and the man with the bandaged eyes had a hand of the other in his own. The dying man took mine in a grip of ice.
"Padre," he whispered, "I am going home. And I wanted you to come again to me. Write tenderly to my people. This will break their hearts. And pray that my brother may be spared." There is no ritual for a moment like that. One could but ask Him who was broken also for others to be near this broken man whose body was pierced unto dying for the sake of those he loved. We whispered together there a few lines of "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," and a verse of the immortally wonderful "Lead, Kindly Light." And then he put his arm about my neck and drew me closer.
"I tried to do what was right," said he. "O Christ, receive my soul. Have mercy upon me." I heard a man near me, in the dark, say "Amen." And I knew the fellows were not sleeping. They were lying there, in their own pain, thinking of him who was passing that night into the great beyond. Then I said, very quietly, the last verse of the hymn he had whispered:
So long Thy power hath blessed me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since and lost a while.
The silence lay between us for a little, till the dying man asked, "What o'clock is it?" And I told him.
"I'm so sorry for disturbing you so late," said he.
"Good-bye, padre, till we meet again." And with a sigh he passed away.
I heard a quiet step near me, and I looked around, with the dead man in my arms. I should not have been astonished if I had seen the very Christ, with His wounds shining there, behind me, in that quiet tent, now so terribly, infinitely still. It was only the woman with the red cross on her breast, the angel of the sick and weary in their pain, seeming always to us, in such a moment, the nearest we can get to Christ, for tenderness and help. And so I laid the dead man down upon his pillow; and had to turn immediately to the living one to comfort him.
II—LIFT YOUR HAT TO THE RED CROSS
As long as I live I shall lift my hat to the red cross. It is, of course, the symbol of the highest sacrifice earth's history ever knew; and it is still the mark of the tenderest devotion and most perfect self-surrender for the sake of others. Every man in khaki, and every man that has a soldier boy to love, should salute that symbol which speaks of love amid the hate and turmoil of war. For it means womanhood consecrated to gentle service, reckoning neither wage nor worry in aught it does, and it takes the sting from broken manhood that has ventured for the sake of honour and of duty, through comradeship in suffering, to the verge of life, and beyond it.
War takes a man in the splendid vigour of his full manhood and flings him out of trench and battlefield a bleeding thing. The devoted women of the hospital tent shrink from no duty when the suffering and mire-stained man is brought to them. There can be no greater self-mastery and no more sublime self-forgetfulness than the washing of the bodies of the stricken and the dressing of the terrible wounds that have broken their murderous way into the fair flesh of the soul's house. And how they work! It has to be seen to be understood, and once seen it can never be forgotten. Faithfulness, tenderness, and loving devotion are the marks of those ministering angels, "when pain and anguish wring the brow." There is no question of adherence to hours. It becomes a question of adherence to duty when a rush is on. There is no strike for shorter hours, or an increased wage, or a war bonus with them or the brave men whom they serve. The men, even to the roughest "grouser," appreciate it fully. "O sister! go to rest now," I have heard them say, pleadingly, to the tired woman with the red cross on her breast and the white cross in her heart.
III—THE LADS WHO DRIVE THE AMBULANCE CARS
So, also with the lads who drive the ambulance cars. I have felt my heart fill as I watched them bringing in the wounded. Gently as a mother carrying a sick child in her bosom, they creep with their agonized burdens over the rough roads, calculating every inequality, thinking through every stage of the journey. I remember, at midnight, standing by one that had just been brought in. The first to be lifted out on a stretcher was a fine fellow, an Irishman, with his right arm blown off. The doctor, with his lantern, leaned over and asked his name.
But the suffering man looked up in his face and said, "Sir, before we do anything, please thank the driver. He's a Christian and a gentleman."
The common sorrow of the allied nations binds them very tenderly together. I used to see a fine expression of this in the town where I was first stationed, where some women who had a garden, on the way to the cemetery, were wont to do a very beautiful thing. As, almost daily, the heavy lumbering wagons with the dead came rolling along, those kindly hearts came out and laid on each coffin, above the Union Jack, a bouquet of exquisite flowers. Then the wagons rumbled on toward the graves. It was a sweet tribute to the brave strangers who are fighting in France, so many of them giving their all in sacrifice for liberty, love, and home in this hideous uprising of all that was monstrous in the dark ages that are past.
One perhaps learns most by unlearning. I used to think of the spirit of pain as intensely, even immensely, vocal. I remember, especially, when I was young, a great gully in the north, beside the sea, up which the waves came dashing in perpetually recurrent warfare, the flood seeking ever higher, only to be drawn away down the sloping shingle again, shrieking, to the main. Often in the daytime I would listen, and, in the dark, would linger near, held by the awe of the unsleeping tragedy of that vast elemental grief which sways about the edges of the world. I told my heart, "This is the spirit of the world pain finding voice." But now I know otherwise. I have learned better in the school of suffering, in the land of war. The spirit of pain is silent—tholing, at its deepest. It looks at you out of those suffering eyes. There is no cry in it. For the mystery of duty is within its depths. The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is its truest picture. So it comes to be that the nobility and manliness of the brave combine, with unforgettable splendour of ineffable beauty, the darkness of our times. When they do speak there is a majesty of stillness about their utterance, vast as the mid-deep, far away, out under the stars.
The lads are uplifted by the nearness of the Unseen. I have before me two genuine documents, letters of two fine boys who went godward up the highway of the sun—the way of sacrifice. They speak for themselves. No novelist's imagination could create so fine an utterance. One was scribbled in the trenches, the other in the hospital ward, to those who had the best claim on the best the writers had to give. Said one:
"I am in the trenches, and in half an hour we go over the top. Our artillery is going at it hammer and tongs, the biggest bombardment in English history. It is just like huge express trains rushing through the air in hundreds. All of us are happy in the prospect of a clean fight after so many weary months as passive spectators of anything but warfare, except on rare occasions. If I get through all right I shall add a postscript to this. If not, mother dear, I know you will not be beaten by a Spartan mother who had no heavenly Father revealed to her to look to for comfort, but yet could say, 'Come back with victory, or not at all.' With heaps of love. * * *"
The other is suffused with the same straightforward spirit of fearlessness and faith.
"I was so glad to see your answer this morning, but am sorry I have not enough strength to write much. A good few died of wounds in this hospital through weakness, but I am leaving all doubts with God, as He holds the key of all the Unknown, and I am glad. So if I die before long, and I cannot see anything more sure, I hope to meet you all in God's good time. My wound is numb. It is in my thigh, and I have no pain. * * * I am now at the balance, to live or die. So good day, and God bless all. * * *"
There was nothing really extraordinary about these boys among their fellows. But one is struck by the frequency with which the men, after a deep emotion, touch literature in their letters. Of course the secret of true style lies in a real experience. Some of them, it is true, tell absolutely false tales, and their letters are sentimental poses. But of the letters of dying men there can be no mistake, and these boys wrote these on the threshold of the eternal mystery. They are types of a large proportion of the army of to-day, fighting, suffering, and dying as those who have looked in the face of the Invisible, and are inheriting the promise, "Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life." It is surely an incentive to the people at home, for honour and remembrance.