“Now, boys,” I said, “what am I to talk to you about?” I let them choose their subject very often.
“Tell us the story of the gipsy tent,” they called out.
And there I was at home, and it was all right, and for an hour I told them the story of how grace came to that gipsy tent—the old romance of love.
“Now, boys, I’m through,” I said when I had spoken for an hour—and they gave me an encore. When I had finished my encore, the dear old Colonel got up to thank the “performer”—and he couldn’t do it; there was a lump in his throat and big tears were rolling down his cheeks.
“Boys, I can’t say what I want to, but,” said he, “we have all got to be better men.”
The Gospel was preached in that hut in a different way from what we have it preached at home, but we got it in, and the thing is to get it in.
I was talking behind the lines to some of your boys. Every boy in front of me was going up to the trenches that night. There were five or six hundred of them. They had got their equipment—they were going on parade as soon as they left me. It wasn’t easy to talk. All I said was accompanied by the roar of the guns and the crack of rifles and the rattle of the machine guns, and once in a while our faces were lit up by the flashes. It was a weird sight. I looked at those boys. I couldn’t preach to them in the ordinary way. I knew and they knew that for many it was the last service they would attend on earth. I said,
“Boys, you are going up to the trenches. Anything may happen there. I wish I could go with you. God knows I do. I would if they would let me, and if any of you fall I would like to hold your hand and say something to you for mother, for wife, and for lover, and for little child. I’d like to be a link between you and home just for that moment—God’s messenger for you. They won’t let me go, but there is Somebody Who will go with you. You know Who that is.”
You should have heard the boys all over that hut whisper, “Yes, sir—Jesus.”