The two interesting items are these: twenty-eight out of fifty-two secretaries in a zone where thirty-five secretaries are under shell-fire daily, where the most desperate chances are daily taken and the most menial and body-wearying tasks are daily done, were preachers; and the preachers and the laymen stood side by side, and were of the same stature when a business man's efficiency measurements were applied to them.
I found my own pastor directing the affairs of a busy port-of-entry canteen with all the earnestness and success that mark his ministry at home. I saw the pastor of a large New Jersey "First Baptist Church" levelling the floor in a Y. M. C. A. officers' tent. At a brigade headquarters another minister was in charge of a hut on the first line, set out in the woods for the fellows' completer isolation from even the advantages of a ruined village, and at the point where all lights are turned out at night by supply and ammunition trucks creeping up to the line. Another, a graduate of Northwestern University, a strong-bodied, great-hearted, husky saint, was alone in the dugout, the most advanced permanent Y. M. C. A. station in any army. Just 1,600 yards it is from our most advanced trenches, and directly in front of our last batteries of "75's." I saw a young minister, who is the "informal chaplain" in a great seacoast city, marching at the head of a little funeral party that bore three black stevedores to their last resting-place.
But why multiply instances? The American preacher is just short of omnipresent in France, and he is doing the work of the war from Alpha to Omega with two-handed masculine energy and unselfish Christian zeal. His spiritual message may be shoved across a hut counter along with a can of beans or a bar of chocolate, or it may be quietly spoken about a red-hot stove just before closing-time at night, when he gathers those who care to stay, for "family prayers"; it may be whispered in broken sentences to the lad who has been gassed or to the man dying from his wounds. In a thousand ways it may be given, but it is being delivered.
The minister who left America to preach to the boys at the front, who departed with the words of his people, admiringly spoken, ringing in his ears, and a purse of real American money ballasting his trousers, has had some heavy seas in passage; but he has arrived. Rude shocks have awaited him, and his whole plan of campaign has been ruthlessly changed; but he has not turned back. To-day he is carrying on, and he will stay through. I saw no more inspiring figures in the beautiful land where so much of America's future is now shaping, and where so many of her hopes and fears are centred, than the preacher of the gospel of the Son of God.
I have not said anything about the formal religious services. They are not neglected. The number of these increases with the raising of each hut and the arrival of each new chaplain and secretary. The pulpit messages our fighters are listening to in France are the most eloquent and soul-feeding that are heard by Americans anywhere in the world to-day. Their messengers are from the first line of our American congregations, and these men of God are preaching as they never preached before.
I have had one ambition for this very faulty picture of the American preacher overseas—to leave with my readers the impression of the manhood of the ministry in a time when those who are less than men are either pitied or despised.
I reached a Paris hotel one evening utterly tired, dead for rest. I defied the teachings of Horace Fletcher, however, and ate my supper. Before I had finished my meal—I was late—the doors between the dining-room and the parlor were opened, and the programme of the weekly session of the Paris secretaries' club of the Y. M. C. A. began. I gulped my food to get out of the way.
Then a man began to read in a voice that rested me and warmed my heart, a voice of richness and vibrant with personality. He read from "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush." I stretched my legs far under the table, leaned hard into the chair, and with my back to the speaker drank in the music of his speaking.
The reader was "Dr. Freeman," Freeman of Pasadena, one of the best-loved men in France to-day. He is a "corker," a "prince," the "real stuff," a "humdinger," and a hundred other things, by the ringing testimony of those who know him over there. I followed his trail from the sea to the mountains. I saw the division that he "set up" on the line, travelled the roads over which he distributed his equipment, and heard the men he led there tell how by day and by night he filled his own hands with the meanest tasks and spared not his own body. In Brest I found his manly prayer of purity and strength on the wall of a captain's room. In Toul his successor told me of his unfailing resourcefulness and cheer. Had he his own way, he would be on the line still, out in the greater noise and danger. But he is a good soldier. Now the spiritual directorship of the Y. M. C. A. for France is in his firm hands.
We sat through a raid one night after I had "borrowed" a pair of his socks and mussed up his room, and we talked of the great days that are to be when the boys come home.