A lassie was stooping over one young boy lying on a cot, washing his face and trying to make him more comfortable, and she noticed a hole in his breast pocket. Stooping closer she examined it and found it was a piece of high explosive shell that had gone through the cloth of his pocket and was embedded in his Testament, which he, like many of the boys, always kept in his breast pocket.
Another boy lay on a cot biting his lips to bear the agony of pain, and she asked him what was the matter, was the wound in his leg so bad? He nodded without opening his eyes. She went to ask the doctor if the boy couldn’t have some morphine to dull the pain. The Sergeant in charge came over and looked at him, examined the bandage on the boy’s leg and then exclaimed: “Who bandaged this leg?”
“I did” said the boy weakly, “I did the best I could.”
The poor fellow had bandaged his own leg and then walked to the hospital. The bandage had looked all right and no one had examined it until then, but the Sergeant found that it was so tight that it had stopped the circulation. He took off the bandage and made him comfortable, and the agony left him. In a little while the Salvation Army lassie passed that way again and found the boy with a little book open, reading.
“What is it?” she asked, looking at the book.
“My Testament,” he answered with a smile.
“Are you a Christian?”
“Oh, yes,” he said with another smile that meant volumes.
It grew dark in the tent for they dared not have lights on account of the enemy always watching, but stooping near a little later she could see that his lips were murmuring in prayer. There was an angelic smile on his white, dead face in the morning when they came to take him away.
There was a funeral every day in that place. A hundred boys were buried that week. Always the girls sang at the graves, and prayed. There would be just the grave digger, a few people, and some of the boys. Off to one side the Germans were buried. When the simple services over our own dead were complete one of the girls would say: “Now, friends, let us go and say a prayer beside our enemy’s graves. They are some mother’s boys, and some woman is waiting for them to come home!”