One night a young German was brought in. He was perfectly conscious,
but was reported to be seriously wounded. He was laid out on one of
the tables and when his torn uniform was ripped off, we found he had
been hit by shrapnel and had ten or twelve wounds in his body and
limbs. I never saw anyone more brave. He was a beautifully developed
man, with very white skin, and on the grey blanket looked like a
marble statue, marked here and there by red, bleeding wounds. He never
gave a sign by sound or movement of what he was suffering; but his
white face showed the approach of death. He was tended carefully, and
then carried over to a quiet corner in the room. I went over to him,
and pointing to my collar said, "Pasteur." I knelt beside him and
started the Lord's Prayer in German, which he finished adding some
other prayer. I gave him the benediction and made the sign of the
cross on his forehead, for the sign of the cross belongs to the
universal language of men. Then the dying, friendless enemy, who had
made expiation in his blood for the sins of his guilty nation, drew
his hand from under the blanket and taking mine said, "Thank you."
They carried him off to an ambulance, but I was told he would probably
die long before he got to his destination.
On the 26th of September I spent the night in a dressing station in
the sunken road near Courcelette. I had walked from Pozieres down to
the railway track, where in the dark I met a company of the Canadian
Cyclist Corps, who were being used as stretcher bearers. We went in
single file along the railway and then across the fields which were
being shelled. At last we came to the dressing station. Beside the
entrance, was a little shelter covered with corrugated iron, and there
were laid a number of wounded, while some were lying on stretchers in
the open road. Among these were several German prisoners and the
bodies of dead men. The dressing station had once been the dugout of
an enemy battery and its openings, therefore, were on the side of the
road facing the Germans, who knew its location exactly. When I went
down into it I found it crowded with men who were being tended by the
doctor and his staff. It had three openings to the road. One of them
had had a direct hit that night, and mid the debris which blocked it
were the fragments of a human body. The Germans gave the place no (p. 143)
rest, and all along the road shells were falling, and bits would
clatter upon the corrugated iron which roofed the shelter by the
wayside. There was no room in the dugout for any but those who were
being actually treated by the doctor, so the wounded had to wait up
above till they could be borne off by the bearer parties. It was a
trying experience for them, and it was hard to make them forget the
danger they were in. I found a young officer lying in the road, who
was badly hit in the leg. I had prayers with him and at his request I
gave him the Holy Communion. On the stretcher next to him, lay the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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