"Did you mean what you said about the—preacher just now? Do your thinking quick, and be prompt about speaking. If you meant it, I'm going to punch your nose."

The speaker was "Angel Face," or as he was called, following the militant speech recorded above, "Gyp the Blood." His parishioners in S——, California, might not have recognized his language and his style of delivery on the occasion which introduces him to my readers; but they could not have made a mistake in the speaker himself; the figure and presence of their pastor would identify him anywhere, even at a prize-fight.

And the language used was fully warranted. For two days one of the few "misfits" that the Y. M. C. A. must briefly contend with in France had been making himself particularly obnoxious to the clergyman who finally squelched him. The chap was new, and of the type that seeks to cover ignorance with bluster and to be impressive by emitting loud noises. He made the preacher the target of a good deal of his profanity, and for nearly two days the preacher turned the other cheek.

But, having fulfilled the Scripture, the preacher took a turn around the truck that had carried the party to its work,—a hut was being erected,—and then clamped down upon the shoulder of the vilifier a hand that was heavy and callous with two months of service on the "line" and preached as already related. The mourners' bench was instantly crowded!

"Can't you take a joke?" the frightened husky stuttered.

"No, not that kind," the California divine replied, and continued, "We'll call it quits, since you didn't mean it; but don't try to be funny again until you have studied a joke-book."

The applause that greeted the "clean knockout" was not audible; but it was loud, and the name "Gyp the Blood" was the reward of the victor. The preacher is "wanted" in France, but only the Fighting Parson need apply. Surely it will be unnecessary to add that the "big fight" is not of the kind just described, although the spirit that secured the decision there is the spirit absolutely essential to success in the other.

The present war has made many calls upon the church, and has laid new and heavy obligations upon the ministry. I do not aspire to deal with the general programme of organized religious forces, nor do I pretend to discuss seriously the peculiar religious problems growing out of these unparalleled times. I am ambitious only to present a pen-picture glimpse of the preacher as I saw him in France, the American preacher in action with the American overseas forces.

At the outset I disclaim any prejudice for or against. I saw him under all conditions, from port of entry to the front lines, from cosmopolitan Paris to the odoriferous country village, from training-camp to hospital, at times when he was conscious of being inspected and was on his mettle, and when he thought himself unrecognized and with no fellow countryman about. I have no special brief prepared for him; I judged him by the measure of a man. France has only one uniform to-day, the uniform of the soldier; all other distinctions as to dress have been removed.

I found a few preachers in France who made me thankful for the vivid picture of my own ministerial father, which I carry always with me, they were so disappointing! One was trying to smoke; it was painfully apparent that it was his first attempt. He was doing his best to be a good fellow, and succeeded only in being a fool. Another was rather loudly arguing with a young Y. M. C. A. secretary and trying to convince him that no man could really get on with the men of the army unless he smoked cigarettes and drank the French wines. The younger fellow won the debate, and did so without my seconding speech, which for the other members of the recently arrived party I felt constrained to make, since I was a veteran of several weeks' standing.

Both of these illustrations relate to the use of tobacco, and it will be well to add that a preacher who would feel himself called upon to conduct an anti-cigarette crusade on the western front would be equally a misfit with the one laboring under the sad delusion that to grip the hearts of the men in uniform he must lower his own personal standards.

First of all, a man to succeed with men anywhere must run true to form, must be honest and be his best self; he may be very sure that the American soldier will not misjudge him or be deceived by him. War has an amazing aptness for ignoring reputations and discovering character. If the preacher did not smoke on the western side of the Atlantic, he does not need to smoke on the eastern side; it will take more than smoke to make him a winner. Of course he may run true to his best form and yet be a failure, but he is doomed from the beginning if he turns his back upon his personal ideals and standards.

It is a pernicious fallacy that you must be like men to be liked by them; sometimes men want you to be different. There are supreme occasions in a man's life when, sick of himself and of his kind, he longs for a comrade and a guide whose language, whose habits of mind and of body, are the opposite of his own. Such times come more frequently where the iron death moans by than elsewhere. A cad or a Pharisee has no place in France to-day, but there are no depths in real religion and simple piety too profound for the men who stand for their country's sake in a soldier's narrow place between life and death.

I heard a first lieutenant from Mississippi say to a young United Presbyterian minister: "I came to talk to you to-day because you are different. I feel myself slipping. At bayonet practice a man loses a lot of the things he doesn't want to forget."

I would not refer to this if it were the only incident of its kind.

I have given my two stories of preachers who got away with a poor start. I saw hundreds of preachers in France, American preachers with the Y. M. C. A. and others serving as chaplains. They are a great lot! Measured by every obligation of their ordination, and by their ability and their willingness to adapt themselves to these unprepared-for and utterly unanticipated conditions, they are a great lot! The American preacher in France is a minister. He is doing a tremendous work now, and he will do a far greater work when he returns.

I wish that every pastor in America could have at least six months in actual service overseas. It would pay any congregation to finance its minister's trip abroad for service with the Y. M. C. A.

As to the programme of the Kingdom itself, these men who have heard the great spiritual voice of Civilization in her rebirth, who have toiled and listened through long and terrifying days that crowded out of their lives the petty and superficial things, who have thrilled with the uncovered cries of men for the answer to their heart questionings, for the realization of their soul quests, will not return to be contented within the ancient walls of ecclesiasticism and sectarian differences. They, with the hundreds of thousands they have ministered to, will strike mightily against the props of outgrown systems. With the re-enforcements already promised from missionary lands, they will save us from ourselves, and together we shall set Christ free in His own temple. These who have seen the folly of a too long divided command on the western front, and who have witnessed the wisdom of a generalissimo there, will call for a United Army under the Divine Generalissimo, to press forward on the spiritual front of the world.

One day I saw six men building a road from a military highway in to a Y. M. C. A. supply warehouse. They were working in the rain, breaking rock and standing ankle-deep in mud. Four of the six men were preachers, preachers to large and distinguished congregations at home. The combined salaries of the six amount to $30,000; one man, a Wall Street broker, draws $12,000; divide $18,000 among the other five men!

In a first-line Y. M. C. A. division fifty-two secretaries were working night and day, doing the work of one hundred and twenty-five men. Twenty-eight of the fifty-two were preachers. Ah, but you say, how well were they doing it? This very question was in my mind, and I asked the divisional secretary to tell me how many of the twenty-eight he would keep if he could secure the secretarial assistance he would consider ideal. He went over his list carefully, and said, "Twelve." Rather disquieting! I then asked him how many of the laymen he would retain by the same test, and after quite as careful consideration he said, "Ten," and added: "O, they are all great fellows. You have asked me an efficiency question, and I have applied my ordinary business standards; but some of these very men may prove to be very efficient."

The two interesting items are these: twenty-eight out of fifty-two secretaries in a zone where thirty-five secretaries are under shell-fire daily, where the most desperate chances are daily taken and the most menial and body-wearying tasks are daily done, were preachers; and the preachers and the laymen stood side by side, and were of the same stature when a business man's efficiency measurements were applied to them.

I found my own pastor directing the affairs of a busy port-of-entry canteen with all the earnestness and success that mark his ministry at home. I saw the pastor of a large New Jersey "First Baptist Church" levelling the floor in a Y. M. C. A. officers' tent. At a brigade headquarters another minister was in charge of a hut on the first line, set out in the woods for the fellows' completer isolation from even the advantages of a ruined village, and at the point where all lights are turned out at night by supply and ammunition trucks creeping up to the line. Another, a graduate of Northwestern University, a strong-bodied, great-hearted, husky saint, was alone in the dugout, the most advanced permanent Y. M. C. A. station in any army. Just 1,600 yards it is from our most advanced trenches, and directly in front of our last batteries of "75's." I saw a young minister, who is the "informal chaplain" in a great seacoast city, marching at the head of a little funeral party that bore three black stevedores to their last resting-place.

But why multiply instances? The American preacher is just short of omnipresent in France, and he is doing the work of the war from Alpha to Omega with two-handed masculine energy and unselfish Christian zeal. His spiritual message may be shoved across a hut counter along with a can of beans or a bar of chocolate, or it may be quietly spoken about a red-hot stove just before closing-time at night, when he gathers those who care to stay, for "family prayers"; it may be whispered in broken sentences to the lad who has been gassed or to the man dying from his wounds. In a thousand ways it may be given, but it is being delivered.

The minister who left America to preach to the boys at the front, who departed with the words of his people, admiringly spoken, ringing in his ears, and a purse of real American money ballasting his trousers, has had some heavy seas in passage; but he has arrived. Rude shocks have awaited him, and his whole plan of campaign has been ruthlessly changed; but he has not turned back. To-day he is carrying on, and he will stay through. I saw no more inspiring figures in the beautiful land where so much of America's future is now shaping, and where so many of her hopes and fears are centred, than the preacher of the gospel of the Son of God.

I have not said anything about the formal religious services. They are not neglected. The number of these increases with the raising of each hut and the arrival of each new chaplain and secretary. The pulpit messages our fighters are listening to in France are the most eloquent and soul-feeding that are heard by Americans anywhere in the world to-day. Their messengers are from the first line of our American congregations, and these men of God are preaching as they never preached before.

I have had one ambition for this very faulty picture of the American preacher overseas—to leave with my readers the impression of the manhood of the ministry in a time when those who are less than men are either pitied or despised.

I reached a Paris hotel one evening utterly tired, dead for rest. I defied the teachings of Horace Fletcher, however, and ate my supper. Before I had finished my meal—I was late—the doors between the dining-room and the parlor were opened, and the programme of the weekly session of the Paris secretaries' club of the Y. M. C. A. began. I gulped my food to get out of the way.

Then a man began to read in a voice that rested me and warmed my heart, a voice of richness and vibrant with personality. He read from "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush." I stretched my legs far under the table, leaned hard into the chair, and with my back to the speaker drank in the music of his speaking.

The reader was "Dr. Freeman," Freeman of Pasadena, one of the best-loved men in France to-day. He is a "corker," a "prince," the "real stuff," a "humdinger," and a hundred other things, by the ringing testimony of those who know him over there. I followed his trail from the sea to the mountains. I saw the division that he "set up" on the line, travelled the roads over which he distributed his equipment, and heard the men he led there tell how by day and by night he filled his own hands with the meanest tasks and spared not his own body. In Brest I found his manly prayer of purity and strength on the wall of a captain's room. In Toul his successor told me of his unfailing resourcefulness and cheer. Had he his own way, he would be on the line still, out in the greater noise and danger. But he is a good soldier. Now the spiritual directorship of the Y. M. C. A. for France is in his firm hands.

We sat through a raid one night after I had "borrowed" a pair of his socks and mussed up his room, and we talked of the great days that are to be when the boys come home.

Ah, one of the compensations for the war is the friendships it has made among Christians and the vocabulary it has given them, in which words of faith and fellowship have crowded out the smaller words of doubt and selfishness.

One of the best-loved men I found in France was Freeman of Pasadena, a preacher.

[Note.—I wish to say that the preacher referred to in the opening of this chapter is Rev. William L. Stidger, pastor of the first Methodist Episcopal Church of San JosÉ, California.—D. A. P.]