I was scared green.
However, when we came back to see the colonel we found a very affable human man, who said he couldn't do anything for us about a special ticket if we had no papers to show that we were entitled to it, but that we could go to the window and make a try at getting it. Again we did so. A different agent was at the window, and we went up and asked him for such a ticket. He handed it out without a question.
For the next two minutes I can tell you we did some laughing. We were compelled to stay over night, but at any rate I did not have to face court-martial as a deserter, and in the morning I was in Paris. There is nothing like having a fluent speaker of French with you in France, especially when you are in trouble. I was now back again in the good old country. Dear old France, how good it looked! My heart had been changed and I now immediately went into action again, under the colors of France. The fighting had been very heavy and some terrible scenes were shortly to be witnessed. Hundreds of men were now literally ground to pieces on the Western front.
CHAPTER XXXVIII NO MAN'S LAND
In the French Army, now, I had a different standing than at first. Our unit in its entirety was taken over and we became brancardiers, or stretcher bearers, in the Second Army of France. Accordingly we were quartered in the army barracks. For some time after I got back from Belgium there were days of blood and thunder as a fearful offensive had been launched by the Germans.
An entire change of heart had now come over me. I who had been a kind of peaceful milk and water ecclesiastical pacifist to now stand beside the boys with the guns and even sleep with the poilus whose main object is to kill Germans, and approve of it, was unusual to say the least, and I thought it would shock some of the deacons back in my tranquil church at home. I was ready to even risk a guess that some of my befrocked clerical friends would be surprised. But I figured that when universal freedom was at stake, as I now clearly saw it was, I could not afford to be a neutral even though I was a Presbyterian preacher. I could not resist my conscience.
As I look at it now, I wish they would put a number of these "conscientious objectors" into the same kind of service. That experience was the best thing that ever happened to me. I became enthusiastic for the Allies and the war, and dead against the Kaiser and his gang.
Soon after this I was dispatched to a certain place near L—— for duty. I found a man who had just been out on a wire-cutting expedition. As I lifted him on to the stretcher he said, "Well, I did it anyhow." Then with some effort he related the following experience to me: