By DANIEL A. POLING.
A great crowd filled the Canadian Pacific Railroad Station at Winnipeg, Manitoba, on a February morning in 1915, when the writer hurried into the waiting-room and made inquiries about his train. Wounded soldiers from “overseas” were expected, and their loved ones and friends were waiting tremulously to receive them.
We stood strangely thrilled to see the glad reunion. There were cheers and tears and there was laughter—these latter two are so close that in a supreme moment they always mingle —when the lads in khaki came through the gate. Ah, what a scene it was! Broken bodies gathered into the embrace of mothers who had waited so long; drawn faces covered with the kisses of sisters and sweethearts, wearied limbs borne away in the arms of fathers and brothers.
There were times when I could not see for my weeping—and no man was so weak as to wipe his tears away. The pegging of the crutches, the crying, and the shouting, flowed together in a great “Amen.”
A little group close by me especially attracted my attention. A. mother and father and three sisters—or perhaps one was more than a sister—welcomed a languid fellow who, while his body bore no visible hurt, told of the awful gases with twitching muscles and sunken chest. How the boy—he was hardly twenty—drank them in, and how their eyes, after the riot of the first greeting, devoured him! For a long moment they stood in a silence that was in effect the mightiest shout.
And then the soldier turned, and cried eagerly: “Jim—where is Jim? Jim, old chap!” And Jim was hard by. I had noticed him before as he came hobbling through the gate with our friend whose loved ones had so quickly seized him. A leg gone, close against his body, he had been leaning heavily upon his crutch, looking—wistfully, I thought—at the little group that swallowed up his companion. No one had come to meet him.
At the calling of his name he smiled and took a step forward, and then happened one of the most dramatic incidents that I have ever seen. The boy with hollow cheeks reached his hands toward the crippled soldier; his face flushed until it was afire, and he said: He did it, mother; he did it.” With a cry that no, words have yet been found to express, that mother swept across the space between her and the friend of her, boy, put her arms about him, crutch and all, and kissed him as she had kissed her own son. Nor were the father and the sisters far behind. It was as though the first scene of a great human tragedy had been acted again. Over and over that great-bodied father exclaimed: “God bless you, sir! God bless you, sir! God bless you!”
Here is the story:
It was the first days of the gassing on the Somme. One morning, after several hours of preparatory shelling, the battalion of which these two young men were members was ordered out of the trenches and across “No Man’s Land,” to take the German position directly in front.
But there was no chance. The artillery had not completed its work. The wire entanglements still barred the way. The young Canadians with their cutters and with their bare hands vainly tore at them, hurling their poor bodies hopelessly into their barbed mazes. The machine-guns poured in a very vomit of steel, and—then came the gas!
Close along the ground rolled that merciless cloud; with fiendish cunning it filled every depression, seeking out the wounded that had fallen, and giving them a grave shroud from the very torture-room of hell.
The broken remnant of the battalion was called back to its trench. It was then that Jim, turning as he rolled to safety, heard his friend scream, and saw him plunge-headlong into the awful fumes. With a mad fury he tore off his shirt—it was before the masks came—ripped it through, bound it about his face; and before the hands of his comrades could restrain him, he sprang again into the open, straight into the gas and shell.
It was all over in a moment. Like a wild animal Jim came crawling back, dragging his comrade. He could not walk, for his right leg had been mangled horribly in that first mad leap; but back he came! “He did it! He did it!”
Ah, sir, I shall never forget that morning in Winnipeg!
Today I am thinking of the glad reunion when the mother took again her son and poured out the gratitude of her heart upon his saviour. And in thinking of them, I have come to think of that other One, that other saviour, the Saviour of the world, who gave not a limb but His life, to bear me, to bear us all, back to the trench of safety. Ah, “He did it! tie did it! He did it!”