Our men are like children in their gaiety—pleased with little things as a child with a toy; joking, making believe, making a game out of their very danger; unconscious of their own heroism, as the best kind of boy, who risks his neck for a nest; blindly confident in their leaders. If it had not been for this complete trust in what their officers told them, could the retreat from Mons have ended in anything but disaster? Yet we know that—like children—whole regiments burst into tears when ordered to give up the positions they had won.
A war correspondent ends a terrible account of the further withdrawal from Tournai by a description of a night in a barn where scatterers had taken refuge.
“And all night long,” he says, “there were the sobs of a big corporal of artillery, weeping for his horses.”
In the throes of the great struggle, this side of humanity—call it the childish, if you will, we have Divine authority for believing that it is akin to the spiritual—asserts itself, nay, becomes paramount. To be more precise, the real man is stripped of his conventions, sophistries, and pretences. Only the things that matter are the things that count.
When the Emperor Frederick was dying, his last message was this: “Let my people return to their faith and simplicity of life.”
If he had been spared to his own land, it would be a different world to-day. Under the dreadful test of war the German soldiery as a mass, indeed the whole people, have sunk below the level of the brute. It is the English who have come back to faith and simplicity.
The Rev. W. Forest, Catholic Chaplain of the Expeditionary Force, writes: “It is true to say that the German Kaiser is fighting a community of saints—converted, if you like—but with not a mortal sin scarcely to be found among them.” The special correspondent of the Sunday Times has a touching testimony in a recent issue to men of all denominations: “To be at the front,” he declares, “is to breathe the air of heroes. The Church of England chaplains, in accordance with the general wish among the men, are giving Early Communion Services. It is a marvellous sight,” continues the journalist, “to see the throngs of soldiers kneeling in the dawn, the light on their upturned faces. They go forth strengthened, ready for anything, feeling that the presence of Christ is amongst them.”
With our French Allies, too, the spirit of faith has reawakened. An English officer writes to the Evening Standard: “The French soldiers go into the trenches, each with his little medal of Our Lady hung round his neck—they pray aloud in action, not in fear, but with a high courage and a great trust.”
“On All Souls’ Day,” he adds, “I saw the village curé come out and bless the graves of our poor lads. The graves, mark, of rough Protestant soldiers, decorated with chrysanthemums by the villagers. These poor dead were blessed, and called the faithful departed, and wept over and prayed for.”