Then he turned over and began to sob and cry, “Oh God! Oh God!”
A lassie went to him and soothed him, talking to him gently about home, asking him questions about his mother, until he grew calm and began to answer her, and rested back quite rationally. The stretcher-bearers came to take him to another hospital, and he started up, put out his hand and cried: “Oh, nurse! I’ve got to get back to my men! I’m the only one left!”
Thus the heart-breaking scenes were multiplied.
One boy came back to the hospital in the Argonne badly wounded. He called the lassie to him one day as she passed through the ward, and motioned her to lean down so he could talk to her. He said he knew he was hard hit and he wanted to tell her something.
“I was wounded, lying on the ground over there in No Man’s Land,” he went on. “It was all dark and I was waiting for someone to come along and help me. I thought it was all up with me and while I was lying there I felt something. I can’t explain it, but I knew it was there and I saw my mother and I prayed. Then my Buddy came along and I asked him if he could baptize me. He said he wasn’t very good himself but he guessed the heavenly Father would understand. So he stooped down and got some muddy water out of a shell hole close by and put it on my forehead, and prayed; and now I know it’s all right. I wanted you to know.”
Often the boys, just before they went over the top, would come to these girls and say:
“We’re going up there, now. You pray for us, won’t you?”
One day some boys came to the hut when there were not many about and asked the girls if they might talk with them. These boys were going over the top that night.
“We fellows want to ask you something,” they said. “Some of the chaplains have been telling us that if we go over there and die for liberty that it’ll be all right with us afterward. But we don’t believe that dope and we want to know the truth. Do you mean to tell me that if a man has lived like the devil he’s going to be saved just because he got killed fighting? Why, some of us fellows didn’t even go of our own accord. We were drafted. And do you mean to tell me that counts just the same? We want to know the truth!”
And then the girls had their opportunity to point the way to Jesus and speak of repentance, salvation from sin, and faith in the Saviour of the world.