The Soul of the Soldier: Sketches from the Western Battle-Front

by Thomas Tiplady

God gave my son in trust to me.

Christ died for him. He should be

A man for Christ. He is his own

And God's and man's, not mine alone.

He was not mine to give. He gave

Himself, that he might help to save

All that a Christian should revere

All that enlightened men hold dear.

"To feed the guns." Ah! torpid soul,

Awake, and see life as a whole.

When freedom, honor, justice, right,

Were threatened by the despot's might,

He bravely went for God, to fight

Against base savages, whose pride

The laws of God and man defied;

Who slew the mother and the child;

Who maidens, pure and sweet, defiled;

He did not go to feed the guns,

He went to save from ruthless Huns

His home and country, and to be

A guardian of democracy.

"What if he does not come?" you say;

Well, then, my sky will be more gray,

But through the clouds the sun will shine

And vital memories be mine.

God's test of manhood is, I know

Not, will he come--but did he go?

JAMES L. HUGHES.

PREFACE

The sketches in this book and in my previous one, "The Cross at the Front," are attempts to show the soul of the soldier serving in France as I have seen it during the year and a half that I have been with him. It is a padre's privilege and duty to be the voice with which, in public worship, the soldiers speak to God; and through which their last thoughts are borne to their friends at home. He is their voice both when they are sick or wounded, and when they lie silent in the grave. He speaks of their hopes and fears, hardships and heroisms, laughter and tears. As best he may he tries to tell, to those who have a right and a longing to know, how they thought, and how they bore themselves in the great day of trial when all risked their lives and many laid them down.

Soldiers, as a rule, are either inarticulate or do not care to speak of themselves; and the padre has to be their spokesman if ever their deeper thoughts and finer actions are to be known to their friends. To do this he may have to bring himself into the picture, or even illustrate a common thing in their lives by a personal experience of his own. To reveal life and thought at the Front in the third person, and without sacrificing truth and vividness, requires a degree of literary power and art which cannot be expected of a padre to whom writing is but a by-product, and not his main work.

I have written but little of military operations--these things are not in my province. Moreover, they are not the things which are most revealing. The presence of Spring is first and most surely revealed by the flowers in our gardens and lanes; and the soldier is most clearly seen in the little things that happen on the march--in his billet or in the Dressing Station. Some things are not seen at all. They are only felt, and my opinion about them must be taken for what it is worth. One knows what the men are by their influence on one's own mind and life. I do not judge the morality and spirituality of our soldiers entirely by their habits and speech, for these are but outward and clumsy expressions of the inner life and are largely conventional. There is something else to put in the reckoning, and to find out what the soldiers are worth to us we must somehow get behind their words and actions and find out what they are worth to God, whose terrible wheel of war is shaping their characters.

I appraise them mostly by the total effect of the impact of their souls on mine. I know their thoughts and feelings by the thoughts and feelings they inspire in me. "Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?" There are certain thoughts and emotions that only come to me strongly when I am with the soldiers or when I am living again with them in memory, and so, I take these as their gift to me and judge the men by their influence on my character. Character is, in its influence, subtle as Spring. Words and actions by themselves are too coarse and conventional to do anything but mislead us in judging the quality of our men. "By their fruits ye shall know them." Not by their leaves. Fruit is seed. In the seed the tree reproduces itself. And reproduction, whether in physical, moral or spiritual life, is the test of vitality.

I have not unduly loaded my pages with ghastly details of war, because their effect on the mind of the reader who has not been at the Front would be false and distorting. The reader would be more horrified in imagining them than our soldiers are in seeing them. I have tried rather to show life at the Front, with its mingling of red and gold, horror and happiness, as it affects the soldier; so that his friends at home may see it as he sees it, and with his sense of proportion. If I could only do it, as well as I intend it, my pictures would create a truer sympathy between the home and the trench. Some would find comfort for their hearts, and others would awake to a new and noble seriousness. Soldiers have suffered much through imperfect sympathies. They have been pitied for the wrong things, and left to freeze when they needed warmth. Only when we realize their dignity and greatness and the true nature of their experiences can we be their comrades and helpers. Life at the Front is brutal and terrifying, and yet our soldiers are neither brutalized nor terrorized, for there is something great and noble at the Front which keeps life pure and sweet and the men gentle and chivalrous. When "the boys" come home their friends will, in almost every case, find them just as bright, affectionate and good as when they went out. The only change will be a subtle one--a deepening in character and manly quality, a broadening in mind and creed, and an impatience with cant and make-believe whether in politics or business, Christianity or Rationalism. There will be an air of indefinable greatness about them as of men who have been at grips with the realities of life and death.

In a footnote to one of his songs, Edward Teschemacher says that the gypsies, as they wander through the country, leave a sprinkling of grass or wild flowers at the cross-roads to indicate, to those who come after them, the road they have taken. These flowers are known as the "Patterain."

These essays are my Patterain--wild flowers plucked in France, and left to mark the red path trod during the months I have been with my comrades at the Front.

I would the flowers were worthier, but such as I have, I give; and they are taken out of my heart.