“Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?”

“Yes, France; we understand now.”

IV

SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL

It was the gas ward.  I had held a vesper service that evening and had had a strange experience.  Just before the service I had been introduced to a lad who said to the chaplain who introduced me that he was a member of my denomination.

The boy could not speak above a whisper.  He was gassed horribly, and in addition to his lungs being burned out and his throat, his face and neck were scarred.

“I have as many scars on my lungs as I have on my face,” he said quite simply.  I had to bend close to hear him.  He could not talk loud enough to have awakened a sleeping child.

He said to me:  “I used to be leader of the choir at home.  At college I was in the glee-club, and whenever we had any singin’ at the fraternity house they always expected me to lead it.  Since I came into the army the boys in my outfit have depended upon me for all the music.  In camp back home I led the singing.  Even the Y. M. C. A. always counted on me to lead the singing in the religious meetings.  Many’s the time I have cheered the boys comin’ over on the transport and in camp by singin’ when they were blue.  But I can’t sing any more.  Sometimes I get pretty blue over that.  But I’ll be at your meeting this evening, anyway, and I’ll be right down on the front seat as near the piano as I can get.  Watch for me.”

And sure enough that night, when the vesper service started, he was right there.  I smiled at him and he smiled back.

I announced the first hymn.  The crowd started to sing.  Suddenly I looked toward him.  We were singing “Softly Now the Light of Day Fades Upon My Sight Away.”  His book was up, his lips were moving, but no sound was coming.  That sight nearly broke my heart.  To see that boy, whose whole passion in the past had been to sing, whose voice the cruel gas had burned out, started emotions throbbing in me that blurred my eyes.  I couldn’t sing another note myself.  My voice was choked at the sight.  A lump came every time I looked at him there with that book up in front of him, a lump that I could not get out of my throat.  I dared not look in his direction.

After the service was over I went up to him.  I knew that he needed a bit of laughter now.  I knew that I did, too.  So I said to him:  “Lad, I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t helped us out on the singing this evening.”

He looked at me with infinite pathos and sorrow in his eyes.  Then a look of triumph came into them, and he looked up and whispered through his rasped voice:  “I may not be able to make much noise any more, and I may never be able to lead the choir again, but I’ll always have singing in my soul, sir!  I’ll always have singing in my soul!”