I recalled his despair when I had first enlisted, and compared
it with what happened now. We were at the pier-gates, where we had to
part. I said to him, "If you knew that I was going to die in the next
month, would you rather I stayed or went?" "Much rather you went," he
answered. Those words made me feel that I was the son of a soldier,
even if he did wear mufti. One would have to play the game pretty low
to let a father like that down.
When you come to consider it, a quitter is always a selfish man. It's
selfishness that makes a man a coward or a deserter. If he's in a
dangerous place and runs away, all he's doing is thinking of himself.
I've been supposed to be talking about God As We See Him. I don't know
whether I have. As a matter of fact if you had asked me, when I was
out there, whether there was any religion in the trenches, I should
have replied, "Certainly not." Now that I've been out of the fighting
for a while, I see that there is religion there; a religion which will
dominate the world when the war is ended--the religion of
heroism. It's a religion in which men don't pray much. With me, before
I went to the Front, prayer was a habit. Out there I lost the habit;
what one was doing seemed sufficient. I got the feeling that I might
be meeting God at any moment, so I didn't need to be worrying Him all
the time, hanging on to a spiritual telephone and feeling slighted if
He didn't answer me directly I rang Him up. If God was really
interested in me, He didn't need constant reminding.
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