There are two periods in a soldier's life when he is especially alert to
the appeal of religion. One, as we have seen, is just after enlisting;
the other is after he has been wounded. A clearing station is the first
resting-place he has. He has had a terrible shaking, seen his chum
killed perhaps, taken part in savagery let loose. He is often all broken
up, seeking again for a foundation. The difficulty is that his stay is
so short, as a rule only a few days. Our record patient was poor Burke,
an Irishman from an Irish regiment. He had been wounded when out with a
wiring party which scattered under machine-gun fire. He crawled into a
Jack Johnson hole and lay there out of sight of either side, between the
trenches, for eight days and eight nights. He had a little biscuit and a
water bottle, nothing more. Shells screamed overhead or burst near, and
bullets whistled backwards and forwards over the shell-hole. There were
dead men near in all stages of decay. When he was discovered by a patrol
he had lain there for over two hundred hours, and he was not insane. We
speak lightly of 'more dead than alive.' He was literally that when he
was brought in. Gangrene had set in long ago, and his condition was
beyond description. Surgeon-generals and consulting surgeons came long
distances to see him, an unparalleled example of the tenacity of human
life. He lingered by a thread for many weeks, sometimes a little better,
more often shockingly ill; but at last, six weeks after admission, it
was decided he could be moved. The whole station came to say good-bye to
old Burke, and all who could went to see him lowered gently by the lift
into the barge. Later, we had letters to say that he had survived the
amputation of his leg, and was slowly recovering. But that was the
longest period that any patient stayed with us. Short as the time
generally was, however, it was sometimes long enough to become very
intimate, since both were so ready to meet. There is not, and never has
been a religious revival, in the usual sense of the term, on the