I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of men and women there are to whom the war came as a blessed opportunity to get away from uselessness or heartache. Stranded, purposeless, spiritless, futile, tired, empty, with something broken in the life or seemingly at an end, they suddenly found themselves called on to put forth energies they never knew they had, to meet needs they had never heard of.
“Son of man, can these dry bones live?” one might have been asking oneself a few years previously; and all at once there were multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision, energized into newness of being. Among them I was only one humble, stupid individual; but the summons was like that which came to the dust when it was bidden to be Adam and a man.
I have no intention of telling you in detail what happened to me between that August morning in 1914 and the day I stepped on board the boat at Liverpool more than two years later. There is no need. You know the outlines of that tale already. My case hardly differed externally from any other of the millions of cases you have heard about. The machine of war does not vary in its working much more than any other machine, except for the drama played in each man’s soul.
And of that I can say nothing. I don’t know why—but I cannot. Day and night I think of what I saw and heard and did in those two years, but some other language must be coined before I can begin to speak of it.
In this I am not singular; it is a rule to which I know few, if any, exceptions. I have heard returned soldiers on the lecture platform, telling part of the truth, and nothing but the truth, but never the whole truth nor the most vital truth. I have talked with some of them when the lectures were over, and a flare in the eye has said, “This is for public consumption; but you and I know that the realities are not to be put into words.”
One little incident I must give you, however, before I revert to what happened on the boat.
Having in that early August made my way to Ottawa with Lovey, and decided that I must respond at once to the country’s call, I expected a struggle with him, or something bitter in the way of protest. But in this I was mistaken. He, too, had been thinking the matter over, and, hard as it would be for him to see me do it, that quiet valor which practically no Englishman is without raised him at once to the level of his part.
“All right, Slim. It’s yer dooty to go, and mine to give ye up. We won’t say no more about that.”
“Thanks, Lovey, for making it so easy for me. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Now there’s only one thing—”