The doctrine of the atonement is used to promote the crude idea that to put our responsibilities upon others is more religious than facing them oneself. Christ's atonement is no isolated fact in history to make men cowards, but a sustained attitude of devotion in which every man and woman is to take a part. Instead of thanking Christ for hanging there upon the Cross in our place we should strive for the same courage, the same endurance, the supreme devotion to duty and the vision of Divine Aid will be ours perhaps in Angel form. To the brave in all ages has come the vision of higher things.
"I never was religious, but this business is changing me and many thousands more," so writes a soldier. From another soldier's letter we get, "War is the most sobering influence I know ... it sobers their every day. They listen more attentively to the religious services. Sometimes I wish for the sake of the morals of our army that we were always at war."
When I was in Northern France I came in contact with many wounded French soldiers, men who had gone to the front as atheists and returned firm believers. "Thank the good God I have really seen. I fell wounded in twenty-three places they tell me. I fell cursing a God I did not believe in: then a cold hand was laid upon my brow. I looked up and saw--ah! my God! how beautiful a Being. Now I do not want, I do not care to live for I want to see that beautiful Being again. I know I shall. Leave me. See to the others." This was a voluntary statement of a French soldier who called me to his side simply to light a cigarette for him. I left him perfectly happy and it was quite true about his number of wounds. He lived only a few hours and he knew that he was dying. Men do not usually tell lies on their death beds.
Wonderful is the warp and woof of life under fire. It is the parade of the living, the dead and those on the borderland. Men go through the whole gamut of emotions. War is an object lesson of laughter and tears playing hide and seek with each other. The tragedy and the comedy follow close on each other's heels. Deep calls not only to deep but to shallow as well, and in the end all notes harmonize. Where the swathe of the scythe is wide men's souls expand in heart qualities. Amidst the wreckage of a battlefield he picks up all kinds of things, every faculty picks up something and they become contributions to soul force. The greater the gloom the more the soldier searches for the gleam. Religion and resolution meet in the soldier and give him deeper vision. He hears his comrade say, "I shall be taken to-day, give this to ----." Examples of this premonition abound. He enters a bombarded village, the only thing standing intact frequently is a figure of Christ crucified, or the Madonna looking down upon a mass of crumbling ruin. These facts are again and again verified by photographs. Often the talk of the camp as the men settle down by the fire is of the weird and the uncanny that has happened during the day; and there are pauses when the soldiers stare into the embers and forget to suck their pipes.