“It’s luck, you know. I’ve been fortunate all along—all these months out at the front and never a scratch the whole time. I half believe it has something to do with that little mascot of mine; I’ve carried it with me since I first went out.”
This was Roger Brent’s usual explanation of the fact that, in spite of much service at the front, he had escaped practically unscathed. He never thought of ascribing it to the over-ruling and protecting hand of God.
He had been a prosperous business man, but he had laid aside his work to answer the call of King and country, and into the new life and the training he had thrown all the tireless energy of his active nature. He had entered the ranks as a private, but promotion had been rapid: Then had come the commission, and now he was Captain Roger Brent, with the responsibility of the command of his unit.
Roger Brent had known the “fair fields of France” in days of peace, and now his eyes sorrowfully surveyed the terrible scenes of devastation, the fine forests blighted and spoiled, the trees blackened and stunted, all that had been fair and good so sadly and wantonly destroyed.
A particular heavy engagement had been taking place, With the aid of the tanks the enemy had been hunted out of a maze of trenches and driven back from village to village, and now, our troops, victorious, but footsore and weary, and exhausted with a long fast, were ordered to return to their base.
Captain Brent, anxious for the safety of such of his men as that long and fearful ordeal had spared, brought up the rear. They had occasion to cross an exposed position, and the captain, looking more to the safety of others than to his own, inadvertently caught his feet in a barbed wire entanglement about halfway over.
“Ah, clumsy!” he exclaimed, as he stooped to extricate himself, but he soon found he was unable to move, and a target for some enemy snipers on watch some distance away.
With a supreme effort he got free, but only to fall headlong into a deep shell hole, which for a time rendered him insensible.
With returning consciousness he was raising himself to his feet when he felt something move beneath him, and, to his amazement, heard a voice in low muffled tones from the depths.
“Never leave... never forsake...” and then more audibly the whole verse, “I will... never... leave thee...” and with a gasp for breath, “nor forsake thee.”
In the pitchy darkness of that shell hole, more like an impromptu burying place, a living tomb, than anything, he felt about for what he was sure must be a comrade yet alive. Groping carefully, he soon discovered beneath him another man who must have been stunned by a fall similar to his own.
Pulling himself together, he managed to climb out of the shell hole, and to drag up his companion to the ground above, where he seemed revived and strengthened by the fresh air.
As the two men, helping one another, managed to crawl back to the safety of the base, Brent learned that Private Jack Richards had lain in that shell hole for three days and nights in a state of stupor, without food or drink. His fall had really saved his life, for the men on either side of him on the defensive line had been shot dead, and he had been saved from the murderous gunfire and bursting shells.
“Yes,” he said, “I expect it was mother’s prayers—for those words kept coming back to me in moments of consciousness: “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.”
This incident left a marked impression upon Captain Brent. Finding that Richards’ home was not far from his own, he promised that when his leave came he would call on the man’s parents; and he made a solemn resolve that if Private Richards’ escape and deliverance could, on his investigation, be attributable to prayer, and not to luck, or chance, he himself would seek that God who had proved mighty to save.
Carefully noting all particulars in his pocket book, he waited anxiously for his few days in “Blighty,” and when at last they came, he fulfilled his promise of calling on Mrs. Richards.
And from her lips he learned that at the very time when her boy, Jack, was in such special peril, she had been constrained to retire to her room to pray for him.
“I felt that I must pray for him just then,” she said, “that there was terrible danger threatening him, and he needed my prayers as newer before. And then I felt certain that God would help and save my boy, for He sent His own promise into my mind, ‘I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.’” The very words that Brent had heard Richards utter in the darkness of that shell-hole.
It was the turning-point in the young officer’s life. That wonderful promise heard in the shell-hole was his for the taking, and he resolved, like Jacob of old, “the Lord shall be my God.”
COURTHOPE TODD.