Opposite the writer at the ship’s table sat a young man with the lower part of his face carried away.  His chin and jaw were gone, yet he must live on for a lifetime deformed.  Another young fellow had spent seven long weary months in training.  The moment his regiment reached the front it was ordered immediately into action.  He sprang to the top of the trench, but never got over it.  He fell back wounded.  Within three days he was back in England again, but with only one leg.  Seven months of training, five minutes in action, then crippled for life!  The writer saw one young fellow whose face was left contorted by shrapnel, which had carried away one eye and the bridge of his nose.  He was a quiet, earnest Christian.  He said, “Of course, they cannot send me back again into the line or compel me to go with only one eye, but I am going just the same.  I am going to give all that I have left to the country and the cause.” [4]

Hear that young soldier of France, Alfred Casalis, a brilliant student of philosophy and theology, a Student Volunteer for the African mission field, as he writes home to his father and mother at the age of nineteen:  “I volunteered of course.  I know with an unalterable knowledge and with an unconquerable confidence that the foundation of my faith is unshakeable, it rests upon the Rock.  I shall fight with a good conscience and without fear (I hope), certainly without hate.  I feel myself filled with an illimitable hope.  You can have no idea of the peace in which I live.  On the march I sing inwardly.  I listen to the music that is slumbering inside me.  The Master’s call is always ringing loudly in my ears.  I am not afraid of death.  I have made the sacrifice of my life.  I know that to die is to begin to live.”  And the last sentence of the unfinished letter written before the charge in which he fell, “The attack cannot but succeed.  There will be some wounded, some killed, but we shall go forward and far—­” In the other pocket of his coat, at the end of his will were the words, “’I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.’  And I would that all my friends, all those who are every moment with me, and whose hearts beat with mine, should repeat the word of our hope, ‘Because I live, ye shall live also.’” [5]

Professor Gilbert Murray, of Oxford, writes thus of the sacrifice of the men for us:  “As for me personally, there is one thought that is always with me—­the thought that other men are dying for me, better men, younger, with more hope in their lives, many of whom I have taught and loved.  The orthodox Christian will be familiar with the thought of One who loved you dying for you.  I would like to say that now I seem to be familiar with the feeling that something innocent, something great, something that loved me, is dying, and is dying daily for me.  That is the sort of community we now are—­a community in which one man dies for his brother.”