“I had a brother who was in the Battle of the Wilderness during the Civil War. He told me of a day in that dreadful wilderness when the Connecticut regiment was traveling through such deep mud that they could hardly pull their boots out of it as they took one step after another. They were thoroughly dispirited and they had no music—the band was far in the rear, but all at once they heard the sound that told them the band was coming, and as it drew nearer they caught the strain. The band was playing a tune known to every Methodist: ‘Come on, my partners in distress, My comrades through the wilderness, Who still their bodies feel. Awhile forget your griefs and fears And look beyond this vale of tears To that celestial hill.’ “My brother said it acted like magic on that regiment, the largest proportion of which were Methodists; new life entered into them. A moment before their feet had stuck in the mud, and they did not see how they were ever to get along, for again and again they had to pull their boots out of the mud with their hands, but from the time that tune, with the words that memory made so distinct, was heard, not a step faltered.”[13] This story from the Crimean War might be duplicated from other wars for it tells of A Soldier Saved by Song Duncan Matheson, a Bible reader to the soldiers in the Crimea, was returning one night to his lodgings in an old stable. Sickened by the sights he had seen, and depressed with the thought that the siege of Sebastopol was likely to last for months, he trudged along in the mud, knee-deep. Happening to look up, he saw the stars shining calmly in the clear sky. Weariness gave place to the thought that in heaven is rest, and he began to sing aloud the old hymn: “How bright these glorious spirits shine! 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