I said, “I am. You leave them to me.”
They said, “All right,” and I began to give out the postcards.
I started at one end of the train and went on to the other end. In the middle I found two carriages full of officers.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “will you please censor these postcards as I collect them, and that will relieve the pressure on the local staff, for I don’t want to put any extra work on them?”
“Oh, certainly,” they answered, and I sent a dozen or twenty up at a time to them, and in fifteen minutes that train was steaming out of the station and the boys were singing, “Should auld acquaintance.”
When they had gone I collected the postcards that had been written and censored—and there were 575. To keep the boys in touch with home is religion; to keep in their lives the finest, the most beautiful home-sentiment that God ever gives to the world is a bit of religion—pure and undefiled.
How gloriously brave are the French women and Belgian women! I was talking to one in London—a young girl not more than eighteen or nineteen. She was serving me in a restaurant, and I saw she was wiping her eyes, so I called her to me and said, “What’s the matter, my child?”
She answered, “Sir, I came over on the boat from Belgium early in the war, and my mother and sisters got scattered, and I have never seen or heard of them since.”
And the Madame of the restaurant came to me a little while afterwards, and said, “We dare not tell her, but they were all killed.”