That was love; for a man, if he told the truth, would say, “I hate the
Front.” Yet most of us, if you ask us, “Do you want to go back?” would
answer, “Yes, as fast as I can.” Why? Partly because it's difficult to
go back, and in difficulty lies a challenge; but mostly because we
love the chaps. Not any particular chap, but all the fellows out there
who are laughing and enduring.
Last time I met the most wounded man who ever came out of France
alive, it was my turn to be in hospital. He came to visit me there,
and told me that he'd been all through the Vimy racket and was again
going back.
“But how did you manage to get into the game again?” I asked. “I
thought the doctors wouldn't pass you.”
He laughed slily. “I didn't ask the doctors. If you know the right
people, these things can always be worked.”
More than half of the bravery at the Front is due to our love of the
folks we have left behind. We're proud of them; we want to give them
reason to be proud of us. We want them to share our spirit, and we
don't want to let them down. The finest reward I've had since I became
a soldier was when my father, who'd come over from America to spend my
ten days' leave with me in London, saw me off on my journey back to
France. I recalled his despair when I had first enlisted, and compared
it with what happened now. We were at the pier-gates, where we had to
part. I said to him, “If you knew that I was going to die in the next
month, would you rather I stayed or went?” “Much rather you went,” he
answered. Those words made me feel that I was the son of a soldier,
even if he did wear mufti. One would have to play the game pretty low
to let a father like that down.
When you come to consider it, a quitter is always a selfish man. It's
selfishness that makes a man a coward or a deserter. If he's in a
dangerous place and runs away, all he's doing is thinking of himself.
I've been supposed to be talking about God As We See Him. I don't know
whether I have. As a matter of fact if you had asked me, when I was
out there, whether there was any religion in the trenches, I should
have replied, “Certainly not.” Now that I've been out of the fighting
for a while, I see that there is religion there; a religion which will
dominate the world when the war is ended--the religion of
heroism. It's a religion in which men don't pray much. With me, before
I went to the Front, prayer was a habit. Out there I lost the habit;
what one was doing seemed sufficient. I got the feeling that I might
be meeting God at any moment, so I didn't need to be worrying Him all
the time, hanging on to a spiritual telephone and feeling slighted if
He didn't answer me directly I rang Him up. If God was really
interested in me, He didn't need constant reminding. When He had a
world to manage, it seemed best not to interrupt Him with frivolous
petitions, but to put my prayers into my work. That's how we all feel
out there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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