An Australian of the real primitive sort was moving across No Man's Land to the attack on Fromelles, and he stopped amid the hail of bullets and bursting shells and leaned on his rifle. A comrade rushed up and inquired, 'What is the matter, mate; are you hit?' 'Hit, no,' he shouted; 'if you want to know what I am doing, I'll tell you. I am saying a prayer.' With that he seized his rifle and went forward to the charge.
An Australian non-com., who went right through Gallipoli and was in many a fight, wrote to me and said that since a certain service at Mena Camp, in Egypt, he had made prayer the habit of his life, and it helped him to play the game. 'I have never gone over the bags without prayer first, and specially commending myself to God, and I find it bucks me up a lot.'
Another, referring to an address on the text, 'Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me,' wrote: 'The note of guidance and strengthening helped me a great deal in the hard business of the attack on the Lone Pine, and it was constantly with me in the Gallipoli days.'
Whilst so many in pulpit and pew have ceased to ponder and wonder at the mystery of the Atonement, soldiers have seen a new meaning in it. A man in our force at Anzac said to me: 'I never could understand before; but now, when I know I may be blown out, I reckon there isn't much chance for me unless somebody has made up for my failure and done for me what I have not been able to do for myself. I guess that is what it means.'
He did not express it very well, but agreed with me when I said that 'Calvary has made up for our failure to come up to the standard of Sinai.'
That most difficult idea of substitution for us and representation of us in the death on the cross is forced into men's minds by many an illustration now. To a soldier dying at Étaples, a chaplain[chaplain] said, 'Do you understand, and does it help you to know that Christ died for you?' 'Oh, yes,' he said, 'I know He died for me, just as I am dying for those shirkers at home.' He used the word 'shirkers' without condemnation, just as the first word which came to him, and passed away at peace and content.
For so long the Cross, with its extended arms, has spoken to the world of a redemption of love. But we passed by carelessly, not choosing to understand; so that we might well ask of the multitude:
All ye that pass by,
To Jesus draw nigh:
To you is it nothing that Jesus should die?