"Saw a Dutchman to-day, saw him from here up."

The speaker indicated with his hands that part of a man's body between hips and head.

"You know I'm a pretty good shot. Didn't see him again."

Pause.

"Do you know what I've been thinking ever since? I've been hoping he isn't in my fix; I hope he doesn't have a wife and kid."

The red-headed sergeant from Boston was the spokesman—a sharpshooter and a fluent user of Sunday-school language—in his own lurid way. It was night, and he had been hanging around for some time waiting his chance to "spill himself." I shall forget all of my own speeches, but never his. I was moved too deeply for words. I stuck my hand out, and said, "Put her there!" and he understood.

I heard no hymn of hate on our line in France. I saw prisoners of war treated like men; they had fought like men, our fellows said. I saw wounded prisoners brought out with every consideration and care. And as the result of a raid that came over early in March a German captain of infantry lies by the side of an American captain of infantry. He was buried with military honors. Why? That was the question I asked, and the answer I received was a look of surprise.

Modern warfare has not changed the traditions of American arms. I say that there is no hymn of hate on the American front in France. There will be desperate deeds a-plenty. In the outpouring of passions men will become the instruments of appalling vengeance. War is not pretty. Americans will not lightly regard a crucifixion, and they will punish treachery. Atrocities will have their own reward. Men cannot sing songs of peace while handless babies cry in pain before their eyes, and girls big with child name their despoilers. It is not difficult to be charitable with those who have seen so much and suffered so greatly, when they for the moment use the only weapon their foe seems to value and to fear.

But the programme of the army has no hymn of hate. Its spirit is the spirit of punishing wrath without malice; its thrust is not for man, but for a system; it looks upon its foes with even pity and regret while it abhors and hates and destroys the power that makes them bloody pawns.

I listened one evening to the address of a one-armed French colonel. He had been left for dead before Verdun. Thirty-six hours he lay in the open, suffering the tortures of a living, earth-born hell. He said:

"The German 'Hymn of Hate' saved Paris. Down across Belgium the gray barbarians came, thrust forth by a philosophy of 'Might makes right' and believing that terrorizing a people will conquer its will to resist. They gave their bayonets an extra twist and lingered with them to be cruel; they lost seconds. In the market-places of Louvain they dishonored women and girls; they lost minutes. They butchered hostages, and left the scars of rapine and murder upon the cities of Flanders and Picardy; they lost hours.

"France had her chance! Britain came! When we turned, we had no time to hate, no time for the extra bayonet-thrust. We saw no individual German. It was for France! We heard her cry in the weeping of our women; she spoke to us from her fields watered with the blood of our brothers. Vive la France! Vive la France!"

I learned as a lad that to master another, or to master a task, one must first be master of himself. Once in a great football contest I saw a college defeated because her captain and star tackle was goaded into slugging by the constant "dirty work" of the lesser man opposing him. I felt at the time that the blow which knocked the unfair player into the mud with a streaming, broken nose was less than he deserved, but that same blow put my hero out of the game.

I have a book, the supreme ethical, moral, and religious volume of all time. In it is written that he who treasures an evil passion in his heart, or allows it residence in his soul, is by so much less than the man he might be. No hater can be at the height of his possible efficiency in physical strength, in moral courage, or in spiritual stamina. In the long run a nation loses power in proportion as her system of faith disregards moral values.

Germany has temporarily changed the map of Europe, but unless God contradicts Himself she is farther from triumph to-day than she was when her legions stood before LiÉge. No long-distance gun from Krupps' can outrange the truth.

"The German 'Hymn of Hate' saved Paris." Yes, and it will be written at the end, "The German 'Hymn of Hate' saved America and the world." It was not the "Star-Spangled Banner," that hymn of unsullied glory, that sent America marching out of her isolation into the slaughter-plains of Europe; it was the "Hymn of Hate," the hymn of submarines and Zeppelins, of poison gas and unnumbered atrocities, the hymn that mingled with its chorus the cooing of infants about to drown and the screams of women about to suffer the greater death.

What Britain and France and Russia and America, perhaps, could not have done, Germany has done herself.

But is this system of faith practical from the standpoint of the individual, the individual who has suffered, suffered in his own body and in the flesh of those dearer to him than his own life, the tortures of hell? I have visited in scores of British homes of mourning, and have generally found the fulfilment of the promise, "As thy days, so shall thy strength be."

In Cooke's Presbyterian Church, Toronto, Canada, one Sunday morning of November, 1916, I listened to a sermon preached by Rev. Mr. McGaw, then assistant to Dr. William Patterson. Mr. McGaw later became pastor of a church in Montreal. He is as Irish as his name suggests. His own family has been in France from the beginning; when the sermon to which I refer was delivered, two brothers were lying in hospitals, wounded. At the close of the service Mr. McGaw prayed; and, as he prayed, I found myself in a sweat of amazement. He said:

"Our Father, thou knowest that we do not pray for the triumph of German arms; we pray for the destruction of the power that has wasted the world, for the despoiling of the ruthless despoiler, for the toppling of the last crown of autocracy, and that the last throne of militarism shall be tumbled down. But, our Father, as we pray for our own who suffer, for our wounded brethren, for our dying comrades, for our widowed and our orphaned and our bereft, we pray for the sufferers of the enemy."

By my side that morning sat a returned Canadian soldier with blinded eyes. As I lifted my head after the prayer, I looked into the face of my friend who had made so great a sacrifice, and his face was illumined by a "light that never was on sea or land." I was wrong. McGaw was right.

The Christian must not forget whose he is and whom he serves, even though the vindication of righteousness seems afar off and tardy. He must, for the sake of his country as well as for the demonstration of the faith committed to him, be a "doer of the word." He must so speak now that when the war is over he will not be ashamed.

That the soldier does not expect to find the "Hymn of Hate" in the pulpit, and is resentful when he hears it there, is at least suggested by a paragraph from a letter in "Letters from Flanders," written by Lieutenant Bey Gillespie, one of the earlier martyrs of the war, a Scotch lad of brilliant promise, whose happy part it was to speak, in speaking his own heart, for hundreds of thousands of other British youths less able than he to make vocal the quests and questionings of their souls:

"Personally I do not care for a mixture of the two styles; and when the cleric says, 'Please God the Germans will take it in the neck,' it makes me wriggle in my chair and feel uncomfortable all down my back. However, when he left our German enemies alone and got to those others with whom a bishop is more particularly concerned, he was very good; and I think the men enjoyed him, for it was something quite new to most of them."

In the London Times, March 15, 1918, appeared a remarkable letter from a British officer who had shortly before reached a convalescent home in Holland after three and one-half years' imprisonment in Germany. It was a ringing protest against the agitation of the pacifists in Parliament and a calm but intense arraignment of the "Landsdowne letter," which had appeared only a short time before. But, wonderful as was the letter itself, the spirit in which it was written was even more wonderful. The concluding paragraph is as follows:

"Unless Germany is beaten in the field we cannot win this war. Any peace based on compromise, whatever its terms, can be only a degree better than a British defeat. The loss of life, of money, of time, will have been to no purpose. The whole terrible tragedy will have to be begun over again. And let no one think that it is for reasons of revenge or in order to enable us to impose harsh and heavy terms that we must defeat the German armies. On the contrary, let us be very generous in the hour of our victory, but until that hour comes let us cease to wrangle about peace terms. For the moment there can be but one war aim—to defeat Germany."

That religion does not make the fighting man less bold, his hand less certain, and his heart less resolute, is evidenced by the fact that the mightiest soldiers since Christianity became a factor in the affairs of men have been, to the fulness of the light they possessed, worshippers of the Nazarene, followers of Him who, being the Prince of Peace, was not afraid to die for the truth. And the greatest of the captains, who in the height of his power denied the sway of the Galilean, cried out in his defeat, "What an abyss between my deep misery and the eternal reign of Christ!"

When this war is ended, ended in the triumph of Democracy,—and until such triumph comes it must not end,—the words of Julian the Apostate will live again: "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean."