He had been on the job for weeks when I met him, but his ardor was as intense as when he began. "Why try to sleep when slumber only brings visions of bedraggled lads who need friendly rooms, warming fires, writing-tables, talking-machines, red-hot drinks, and the comradeship and sympathy of the Y. M. C. A. secretaries?" This was his question for all interested friends who tried to give him advice as to his own welfare. He religiously blasphemed his laryngitis, flagrantly disobeyed his considerate chief, and for hours broke every rule that the American Federation of Labor has ever indorsed.
He celebrated the last Sabbath of my association with him by persuading a United Presbyterian minister to work all day on a Y. M. C. A. hut for four hundred drivers of supply and ammunition trucks, who were quartered in a desolate forest miles from every comfort. By putting in the entire Sunday he gave those men a warm room in the evening. The "Count's" tired face was unusually attractive as he stood eating his late supper that night, and his ministerial friend looked as if he had a fuller understanding of the text, "The Sabbath was made for men."
A few hours before I left this division the "Count" brought me a Testament, and said, "Doc, I'm not in your line; but there's no telling when I will 'get mine' out along the road somewhere. Suppose you mark my book up; hit the places you know that have the stuff, and I'll be obliged." I "marked it up" a bit, and put a line or two on the title-page, and left it for him. He was away before I had finished. I am not sure that we said, "Good-by"; at any rate, we have not separated.
The "Count's" words do not always do him justice. The tobacco he smokes is not of a fancy brand. Theologically he is hard to locate; but he is an unassuming, unequivocating follower of the "Inasmuch," and a two-handed man of the Christ.
"Smith" was altogether different; tall and shallow-chested, thin of face and red-headed, he looked every drop of the Scotch that flowed unmixed in his veins. He was a "graduated" British Tommy. One lung was gone, and the rest of him had been so badly used in the blowing-up of a sap-head that the hospital judges refused to give him another chance to die for his country in the trenches.
He was one of the immortal "First Hundred Thousand," the glorious "Contemptibles" who fought from Mons to the Marne, the mightiest rear-guard action known in the history of wars. He was one of those who suffered the horrors of gas in front of Ypres. But he could not rest in London—rest there with his wife and babies, rest there with his laurels. Across the Channel the cause of his race still trembled in the balance, and it was thither that his heart commanded him.
When the army refused him absolutely, he finally secured a position as an automobile-driver with the American Y. M. C. A.; and so he carried me from an ancient city in Brittany to a great barrack camp established by Napoleon, but now filled with American artillery in training.
The judgment of his associates would warm his kindly heart if he could hear the words with which they told me his story. The hacking, deep-seated cough that racks him is more than the evidence of his torture. To those who have heard it and who know him it is the token of a higher heroism than that with which he tunnelled under the enemy's lines or faced the shock of their attack.
As I watched him disappear among the French soldiers bound for the front, who crowded the station on the night when I took my departure, the words of another soldier came to me: "He that endureth to the end shall be saved."