“Ah, there was the first ‘over-the-top’ experience, when you stood on the fire-step with gun in hand, palefaced, but with clenched teeth, in an oppressive silence, waiting to hear the command come down the line,—whispered from mouth to mouth. Then you leaped wildly over into long-anticipated perils, to become entangled in barbed wire, or perhaps to get your first shock, as the man next you dropped like lead at the first ‘ptt’ of a German sharpshooter’s bullet.
“But on you rush in a mad frenzy with red-misted eyes, in the face of a heavy artillery fire and a pitiless gale of shrapnel, through a dense smoke-screen, split with lurid flashes of flame, over a ground pitted with shell-holes—to stumble over some dead Tommy, whose glazed eyes stare up at you as if in mockery of your determination to play the man in this crusade for humanity.
“Then my adventure came,—a raid on a German trench, an undertaking attended with great peril. With blackened faces, each man, with his bag of bombs and automatic, at the flicker of a white light crawled stealthily into the sable blackness of ‘dead man’s yard,’ and, in a downpour of drenching rain, crept on hands and knees, sometimes wiggling on his stomach,—quickly rolling into a shell-hole if a sound was heard,—until the German trench loomed menacingly only a few feet beyond.
“Everything was deadly still. Then the signal came, and with a rush we clambered stealthily up and peeped over, to see a yellow-haired Heinie asleep in the little alcove back of his gun-emplacement, the head of the sentry-on-post tipsily nodding on his chest, and two big fellows snoring like porpoises on the floor near. In just one minute we had slid into that trench and had our men with hands up. Sure it was a surprise-party for Fritz, for the Germans came running out of their dug-outs, wrapped in blankets, noisily demanding to know what was up. They soon knew, and then came a riot of a time as we let our hand-grenades fly, and our bayonets too, aided by a lively fire from our machine-guns. And then we were out, making a quick run for our own trenches with our trophies, and several of the surprised ones, with the German guns thundering in our rear.
“Yes, I had captured my first Hun, and mighty proud I was of my achievement, and pictured my delight-to-be when retailing my adventure to my comrades, when Zipp! and I was downed by the pieces of a bursting shell that got me in the hand and foot. And the prisoner? Oh, the dirty Boche saw his chance. I saw his hand go up,—he must have had a stiletto hidden somewhere,—but I was too quick for him for I let fly a hand-grenade, and—well, he bothered me no more.
“For hours I crawled, or wiggled, along, dropping into a chalk-pit or a shell-hole every few moments, for it was like hell under that liquid fire, Fritzie’s aërial bombs and the machine-gun fire; in fact, it seemed as if every kind of projectile had been let loose, for now the Germans were mad clean through. Finally, being too exhausted to make any further headway, I crept into a shell-hole, where I lay for a day and a night, lying on my face most of the time, playing dead, for the German fiends would sneak out into No Man’s Land at night after a bombardment, and kill every wounded enemy soldier they could find.
“What did I think about, you ask, Miss Nathalie, while lying in that shell-hole?” Philip smiled a little sadly. “Well, at first I was crazed with thirst and hunger, and the cold—oh, it was something fierce. And then the doubts and misgivings that had assailed me at times, as to whether there was a God in heaven, returned with renewed force. I dumbly felt that my faith was leaving me, for why this useless slaughter of men’s bodies, this agonizing devil’s gas, this torturing of the aged and weak, this violating of womanhood, this maiming of little, innocent children? Ah, the agony of body was nothing compared to the agony of my soul, as I lay in that hole.
“Then that night—there was no moon, and everything was a dead calm, for a lull had come in fighting—I turned over, face upward, to ease the aching that racked my body. As I lie gazing up at the stars,—they seemed unusually bright,—something white suddenly flashed before me, and then I saw a face bend down and gaze at me. It was a marvelously beautiful face, with such calm serenity of expression as the eyes smiled into mine, that a strange peace came into my soul, my pains were eased, I was filled with a wonderful joy, and—then I knew;—it was the face of the Great White Comrade,—the face of Christ!
“It may have been a delusion from overwrought nerves,—I may have been dreaming,—I don’t know, for there had been great talk among the soldiers of seeing the white apparition of Christ on the battlefield. He was said to have appeared to the soldiers, showed them His bleeding side and hands, and then the suffering ones had felt a wonderful peace come into their souls, and their very agonies had made them triumphant in the thought that as He had died to make men holy, so He had given them the great privilege of suffering and dying to make men free. No, I didn’t see any bleeding side, or the nail-prints on the hands, but I saw Christ’s face, and, oh, it was Heaven!
“Then my brain cleared. I realized that I had been groping in a great darkness, but that a wonderful light had come, and I knew God was in His Heaven. That smile had brought revelation. It had told me that we were no better than Christ, and He had suffered,—He, an innocent soul. And as He had agonized on the cross, and God had suffered with Him, so every moan, sob, and cry had reached His ears in this great wail from humanity. It told me that this bruising of bodies, this rending of women’s hearts, this wringing of men’s souls, had wrung His heart with a suffering greater than men could know.