Prairie Gold Part 24

The young traveler's eyes opened in amazement. "Why no! How could that be? My teacher was like Him," he explained simply.

Again the quick look pa.s.sed about the circle. At last one spoke, slowly: "There is a man here in the village who was also blessed with the children."

The young traveler started up joyously. "Take me to him," he entreated. "Let me talk with him; that is what I have come here seeking--another teacher."

"Nay, friend--" began one; but another hurriedly whispered: "Let us not tell him. Perhaps he can help." And so the first speaker finished: "I fear you will not find him like your teacher, but you shall go; it is only a step."

And they guided him, all but impatient, to a mean hovel just within the town. There they left him.

It was a man with a dark, bitter face that answered his knock. "May I speak with Nemuel?" the stranger asked courteously.

"I am Nemuel," growled the man curtly.

"But I mean Nemuel who was one of the children that Jesus blessed,"

persisted the young traveler, his face softly alight as the name pa.s.sed his lips.

"Come in; I am the man." He straightened proudly. "I was a child seven years old when I saw Him----"

He stopped, for the young stranger, pale and gasping, broke in: "You saw Him! He touched you! You have seen His face, and yet your own--forgive me, friend. But my master was also one of the children blessed by the Christ, and he was ... different." He hesitated, still looking at the somber face in puzzled distress.

The man caught the young stranger's arm. "You knew another of those He blessed? Tell me, did he have great wealth, palaces, honors? Did he wait long? Did the blessing tarry so long in the fulfilment as with me?"

The young stranger shook his head in deep bewilderment. "I do not understand. No, he had no wealth, no palaces, no honors. He followed the Christ. He was blessed by His spirit. Why, how could one want goods and honors when one had seen His wonderful smile, when His arms--" He broke off, gazing at his host in appalled incomprehension.

Nemuel's dark face grew darker, more bitter. "Then there _is_ no blessing, after all," he said slowly. "I have waited, believing, trusting. I have kept my life clean. I have kept myself holy--away from those He had not touched--" The stranger drew a quick breath and his eyes softened with pity. "I have never forgotten that I was blessed above others. And now there _is_ no blessing." And he covered his face with his hands.

There was a silence and then the young stranger spoke very gently: "The blessing my master taught me, was for all children--for all childlike faith and trust and purity. It was a sanctification of the child spirit."

Nemuel had lifted his head and was listening, his eyes fastened wonderingly on the stranger's face.

"And it was not a blessing to be wrapped up in a napkin. It was not one to bring you good fortune, as if it had been a sorcerer's charm.

It was a blessing for you to take and to make--to use it--to give it to others. Through you He blessed _all_ children.... And yet--" the stranger's voice deepened--"yet there _was_ something special too."

"What was it?" Nemuel breathed.

The stranger bent on him a gaze full of yearning. "Have you not remembered His face?" he asked. "His wonderful look--just for you?"

There was a pleading note of reproach in his voice as he leaned toward Nemuel, but his face was all love and tenderness.

Nemuel began to shake his head slowly, still fixing the stranger with his gaze.

"No," he confessed. "I haven't been able to remember--not for years.

At first I did. Afterward I _knew_ His face was wonderful, but I could not _see_ it. But now--now I begin to remember----"

The young stranger waited for the halting words, his face lighting softly with a holy hope and joy.

"Why, your face--" Nemuel still hesitated, groping, and then suddenly his voice rang out in triumph, and memory dawned clearly in his eyes--"why, _your face_--is--like--_His_! Oh, I do remember!--and--I begin to understand."

Kitchener's Mob

From The Atlantic Monthly

_By James Norman Hall_

Trench-mortaring was more to our liking. That is an infantryman's game, and while extremely hazardous, the men in the trenches have a sporting chance. Everyone forgot breakfast when word was pa.s.sed down the line that we were going to "mortarfy" Fritzie. Our projectiles were immense b.a.l.l.s of hollow steel, filled with high explosive.

Eagerly, expectantly, the boys gathered in the first-line trenches to watch the fun. First a dull boom from the reserve trench in rear where the mortar was operated.

"There she is!" "See 'er?" "Goin' true as a die!" All the boys would be shouting at once.

Up it goes, turning over and over, rising to a height of several hundred feet. Then, if well aimed, it reaches the end of its upward journey directly over the enemy's line, and falls straight into his trench. There is a moment of silence, followed by a terrific explosion which throws dirt and debris high in the air. By this time, the Tommies all along the line are standing on the firing benches, head and shoulders above the parapet, forgetting their danger in their excitement, and shouting at the top of their voices:

"'Ow's that one, Fritzie boy?"

"Guten morgen, you Proosian sausage wallopers!"

"Tyke a bit o' that there 'ome to yer missus!"

But Fritzie kept up his end of the game, always. He gave us just as good as we sent, and often he added something for good measure. His surprise packages were sausage-shaped missiles which came wobbling toward us, slowly, almost awkwardly; but they dropped with lightning speed. The explosion was terrible, and alas for any Tommy who misjudged the place of its fall! However, everyone had a chance.

Trench-mortar projectiles are so large, and they describe so leisurely an arc before they fall, that men have time to run.

I've always admired Tommy Atkins for his sense of fair play. He loved giving Fritz "a little bit of all right," but he never resented it when Fritz had his own fun at our expense. I used to believe, in the far-off days of peace, that men had lost their old primal love for dangerous sport, their native ignorance of fear. But on those trench-mortaring days, when I watched boys playing with death with right good zest, heard them shouting and laughing as they tumbled over one another in their eagerness to escape being killed, I was convinced that I was wrong. Daily I saw men going through the test of fire triumphantly, and at the last, what a fearful test it was, and how splendidly they met it! During six months, continuously in the firing line, I met less than a dozen natural-born cowards; and my experience was largely among clerks, barbers, plumbers, shopkeepers, men who had no fighting tradition to back them up, to make them heroic in spite of themselves.

The better I knew Tommy, the better I liked him. He hasn't a shred of sentimentality in his make-up. There is plenty of sentiment, sincere feeling, but it is very well concealed. I had been a soldier of the King for many months before I realized that the men with whom I was living, sharing rations and hards.h.i.+ps, were anything other than the healthy animals they looked. They seemed to live for their food. They talked of it, antic.i.p.ated it with the zest of men who were experiencing for the first time the joy of being genuinely hungry.

They watched their muscles harden with the satisfaction known to every normal man when he is becoming physically fit for the first time. But they said nothing about patriotism, or the duty of Englishmen in wartime. And if I tried to start a conversation on that line, they walked right over me with their boots on.

This was a great disappointment at first. I would never have known, from anything that was said, that a man of them was stirred at the thought of fighting for old England. England was all right, but, "I ain't a-goin' balmy about the old flag and all that stuff." Many of them insisted that they were in the army for personal and selfish reasons alone. They went out of their way to ridicule any and every indication of sentiment.

There was the matter of talk about mothers, for example. I can't imagine this being the case in a volunteer army of American boys; but never, during sixteen months of British army life, did I hear a discussion of mothers. When the weekly parcels post from England arrived, and the boys were sharing their cake and chocolate and tobacco, one of them would say, "Good old mum. She ain't a bad sort,"

to be answered with reluctant, mouth-filled grunts, or grudging nods of approval. As for fathers, I often thought to myself, "This is certainly a tremendous army of posthumous sons!" Months before I should have been astonished at this reticence. But I had learned to understand Tommy. His silences were as eloquent as any splendid outbursts or glowing tributes could have been. It was a matter of constant wonder to me that men living in the daily and hourly presence of death could so control and conceal their feelings. Their talk was of anything but home; and yet I knew that they thought of little else.

One of our boys was killed, and there was a letter to be written to his parents. Three Tommies who knew him best were to attempt this.

They made innumerable beginnings. Each of them was afraid of blundering, of causing unnecessary pain by an indelicate revelation of the facts. There was a feminine fineness about their concern which was beautiful to see. The final draft of the letter was a masterpiece, not of English, but of insight; such a letter as any one of us would have liked his own parents to receive under similar circ.u.mstances. Nothing was forgotten which could make the news in the slightest degree more endurable. Every trifling personal belonging was carefully saved up and packed in a little box to follow the letter. All this was done amid much boisterous jesting; and there was hilarious singing to the wheezing accompaniment of an old mouth-organ. But of reference to home, or mothers, or comrades.h.i.+p, not a word.

Rarely a night pa.s.sed without its burial parties. "Digging in the garden," Tommy calls the grave-making. The bodies, wrapped in blankets or water-proof ground-sheets, are lifted over the parados and carried back a convenient twenty yards or more. The desolation of that garden was indescribable. It was strewn with wreckage, gaping with sh.e.l.l-holes, billowing with numberless nameless graves, a waste land speechlessly pathetic. The poplars and willow hedges had been blasted and splintered by sh.e.l.l-fire. Tommy calls these "Kaiser Bill's flowers." Coming from England, he feels more deeply than he would care to admit the crimes done to trees in the name of war.

Our chaplain was a devout man, but prudent to a fault. He never visited us in the trenches; therefore our burial parties proceeded without the rites of the church. This arrangement was highly satisfactory to Tommy. He liked to "get the planting done" with the least possible delay or fuss. His whispered conversations, while the graves were being scooped, were, to say the least, quite out of the spirit of the occasion. Once we were burying two boys with whom we had been having a supper a few hours before. There was an artillery duel in progress, the sh.e.l.ls whistling high over our heads and bursting in great splotches of white fire, far in rear of the opposing lines of trenches. The grave-making went speedily on while the diggers argued in whispers as to the calibre of the guns. Some said they were six-inch, while others thought nine-inch. Discussion was momentarily suspended when trench-rockets went soaring up from the enemy's line.

We crouched motionless until the welcome darkness spread again. And then, in loud whispers--

"'Ere! If they was nine-inch they would 'ave more screech."

And one of different opinion would reply:

"Don't talk so bloomin' silly! Ain't I a-tellin' you you can't always size 'em by the screech?"

Not a prayer. Not a word either of censure or praise for the boys who had gone. Not an expression of opinion as to the meaning of the great change which had come to them and which might come as suddenly to any or all of us. And yet I knew that every man was thinking of these things.