Whence all their bright array?”
The next day was wet and stormy. While going his rounds he met a soldier, soiled and in ragged clothes; his shoes so worn that they did not keep his feet from the mud. In the course of conversation this man said:
“I am not what I was yesterday. Last night I was tired of life and of this blundering siege. I took my musket and went down yonder, determined to blow out my brains. As I got around that hillock I heard some one singing, ‘How bright these glorious spirits shine!’ It recalled to me the Sunday School where I used to sing it, and the religious truths I had heard there. I felt ashamed of being such a coward. I said to myself, ‘Here is a comrade as badly off as I am, but he is not a coward—he’s bearing it!’ I felt that man had something which I did not possess to make him accept with cheerfulness our hard lot. I went back to my tent, and today I am seeking that thing which made the singer so happy.”
Here is another from the World War, related in The War Romance of the Salvation Army, by Booth and Hill,[14] how
Sunshine Came Into a Soldier’s Heart
It was one Sunday afternoon in Bazeilles, France, at a service conducted by three Salvationists. One of the girls sang:
“There’s sunshine in my soul today,
More glorious and bright
Than glows in any earthly skies,
For Jesus is my light.