They had earned their rest, those laddies who were going home to Britain.  But some of them were half sorry to be going!  I talked to one of them.

“I don’t know, Harry,” he said.  “I was looking forward to this leave for a long time.  I’ve been oot twa years.  My heart jumped with joy at first at the thought of seeing my mother and the auld hame.  But now that I’m started, and in a fair way to get there, I’m no so happy.  You see—­every young fellow frae my toon is awa’.  I’m the only one going back.  Many are dead.  It won’t be the same.  I’ve a mind just to stay on London till my leave is up, and then go back.  If I went home my mother would but burst out greetin’, an’ I think I could no stand that.”

But, as for me, I was glad, though I was sorry, too, to be going home.  I wanted to go back again.  But I wanted to hurry to my wife, and tell her what I had seen at our boy’s grave.  And so I did, so soon as I landed on British ground once more.

I felt that I was bearing a message to her.  A message from our boy.  I felt—­and I still feel—­that I could tell her that all was well with him, and with all the other soldiers of Britain, who sleep, like him, in the land of the bleeding lily.  They died for humanity, and God will not forget.

And I think there is something for me to say to all those who are to know a grief such as I knew.  Every mother and father who loves a son in this war must have a strong, unbreakable faith in the future life, in the world beyond, where you will see your son again.  Do not give way to grief.  Instead, keep your gaze and your faith firmly fixed on the world beyond, and regard your boy’s absence as though he were but on a journey.  By keeping your faith you will help to win this war.  For if you lose it, the war and your personal self are lost.

My whole perspective was changed by my visit to the front.  Never again shall I know those moments of black despair that used to come to me.  In my thoughts I shall never be far away from the little cemetery hard by the Bapaume road.  And life would not be worth the living for me did I not believe that each day brings me nearer to seeing him again.

I found a belief among the soldiers in France that was almost universal.  I found it among all classes of men at the front; among men who had, before the war, been regularly religious, along well-ordered lines, and among men who had lived just according to their own lights.  Before the war, before the Hun went mad, the young men of Britain thought little of death or what might come after death.  They were gay and careless, living for to-day.  Then war came, and with it death, astride of every minute, every hour.  And the young men began to think of spiritual things and of God.

Their faces, their deportments, may not have shown the change.  But it was in their hearts.  They would not show it.  Not they!  But I have talked with hundreds of men along the front.  And it is my conviction that they believe, one and all, that if they fall in battle they only pass on to another.  And what a comforting belief that is!