And he is seeing it through.

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I was at a home for limbless men the other day—­there are over one hundred and eighty of them in that home.  I held my hand out to shake hands with the first two men I met, and they laughed at me.  I looked down for their hands—­they hadn’t got one between them!  I took the face of one of those dear boys and I patted it.  I wanted to kiss it with gratitude.  I wonder how you feel!

I walked round amongst those boys—­one hundred and eighty limbless!  I found one boy without legs and without an arm.  He was just a trunk, and his comrades, those who could, were carrying him around.  He was the sunshine in the whole place—­not a grouse.  They are doing no grousing—­your boys there.  When they see you they just say, “Cheerio.”

A friend of mine, a minister, went to see one of these boys, and he was wondering what he could say to him; he thought he had got to cheer him up.  The boy looked at the padre and said,

“Guv’nor, don’t get down-hearted.  I am going to make money out of this job.  Why, I shall only want a pair of trousers with one leg, and I shall only want a coat with one sleeve, and I shall only want a pair of boots with one boot.”

It reminds me of the question I once asked:  “Sonny, what struck you most when you got in the trenches?” and the reply came sharp,

“A bit of shrapnel.”

Another of your boys, just picked up in the trenches by those tender fellows, the stretcher-bearers, those men with the hands of a woman and with the heart of a mother—­God bless them!—­called out as they came to him, “Home, John.”  And when he was passing the officer and they were carrying him into the Red Cross train, he cried, “Season.”  He had two gold stripes already.  That’s the spirit of your boys.

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There was a dear old Scotchman from Aberdeen.  A telegram had come to that granite city to say that his boy was badly wounded, and he ran all the way to the station and jumped into a train without stopping to put on a collar.  You don’t think of collars when your boys are dying.  I saw him when he landed.  It was my job to help him.  The dear old fellow was just in time to see his boy die—­and afterwards he came and laid his head on my shoulder and he sobbed.  And I wept too.  He was seventy.

Presently he said, “It will be hard to go home and tell mother that her only boy has gone, but I’ve got a message for her.  ‘Father,’ my boy said, ’tell mother I am not afraid to die.  I have found Jesus.  Tell mother that.’”

There are some people who think you are not doing Christian work unless you have a hymn-book in one hand and a Bible in the other and are singing, “Come to Jesus.”  I am glad I haven’t to live with that kind of people.  I call them the Lord’s Awkward Squad.

If you take “firstly,” “secondly,” “thirdly,” out to the front with you, by the time you get to thirdly the boys will be in the trenches.  I never take an old sermon out with me to France.  I write my prescription after I’ve seen my patients.