There are two periods in a soldier's life when he is especially alert to the appeal of religion. One, as we have seen, is just after enlisting; the other is after he has been wounded. A clearing station is the first resting-place he has. He has had a terrible shaking, seen his chum killed perhaps, taken part in savagery let loose. He is often all broken up, seeking again for a foundation. The difficulty is that his stay is so short, as a rule only a few days. Our record patient was poor Burke, an Irishman from an Irish regiment. He had been wounded when out with a wiring party which scattered under machine-gun fire. He crawled into a Jack Johnson hole and lay there out of sight of either side, between the trenches, for eight days and eight nights. He had a little biscuit and a water bottle, nothing more. Shells screamed overhead or burst near, and bullets whistled backwards and forwards over the shell-hole. There were dead men near in all stages of decay. When he was discovered by a patrol he had lain there for over two hundred hours, and he was not insane. We speak lightly of 'more dead than alive.' He was literally that when he was brought in. Gangrene had set in long ago, and his condition was beyond description. Surgeon-generals and consulting surgeons came long distances to see him, an unparalleled example of the tenacity of human life. He lingered by a thread for many weeks, sometimes a little better, more often shockingly ill; but at last, six weeks after admission, it was decided he could be moved. The whole station came to say good-bye to old Burke, and all who could went to see him lowered gently by the lift into the barge. Later, we had letters to say that he had survived the amputation of his leg, and was slowly recovering. But that was the longest period that any patient stayed with us. Short as the time generally was, however, it was sometimes long enough to become very intimate, since both were so ready to meet. There is not, and never has been a religious revival, in the usual sense of the term, on the Flanders front, and I am afraid it is true that modern war knocks and smashes any faith he ever had out of many a man. Yet in a hospital there is much ground for believing that shining qualities which amid the refinements of civilisation are often absent--staunch, and even tender comradeship, readiness to judge kindly if judge at all, resolute endurance, and absence of self-seeking, so typical of our fighting men--have their root in a genuine religious experience more often than is, in the battalions, immediately evident. It has been my experience, again and again, that with dying men who have sunk into the last lethargy, irresponsive to every other word, the Name of Jesus still can penetrate and arouse. The hurried breathing becomes for a moment regular, or the eyelids flicker, or the hand faintly returns the pressure. I have scarcely ever known this to fail though all other communication had stopped.