Lieut.-Colonel Seton Churchill tells, in his booklet, “Brave Women of Great Britain,” published by J. Shaw, 18, High Street, Wimbledon, S.W.19, price 2d.: ―
“A Canadian chaplain says: ―A young soldier from Western Canada used to come regularly to his services and classes, but was shy and not at all responsive when he spoke to him. The young fellow was in one of the great ca attacks, and when the chaplain followed later on with the stretcher-bearers he found him dead. After tending to the wounded he went back to the body to see if there was anything he could send” to his people at home, and he found a diary all soaked in blood. In it he had evidently been briefly recording all the incidents of his life, and the chaplain read, ‘Tomorrow we go over the top-thank God I am ready.’ Then later on, ‘I am wounded in the neck and bleeding to death.’ This was followed in a shaky handwriting, ‘God bless my poor mother’; and then later on in a scarcely legible scrawl, ‘Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.’ The chaplain sent the pocket-book off to the mother, but he said, in telling the story, ‘If I had not seen that diary I should never have thought that young fellow had passed away to glory.’”
Another instance is given in that little booklet, “A Glorious Victory,” of a young wounded officer who had been won for Christ by another officer in hospital. The young officer recovered and again went into action, but was this time killed. When his belongings were sent home his parents found among his papers an account of how the spiritual change came about, by which he passed from death unto life. One might mention more such cases did space permit. Young men are proverbially reticent about their spiritual life, and many have left behind them no such testimony, but that does not mean that we must despair of them. They may yet welcome us on the other shore, where they have gone before.