altar steps--he goes not to the pulpit--there bursts out a volume of vocal
devotional harmony, which is so pent in the aisles and under the arches
that the sound seems almost to become a substance. Then the pastor
delivers a prayer and there is another hymn. He enunciates no text when he
next begins to speak; he chops not a subject up into heads, as the
grizzled major who listens to him would partition out his battalion into
companies. There is no "thirteenthly and lastly" in his simple address.
But he gets nearer the hearts of his hearers than if he assailed them with
a battery of logic with multitudinous texts for ammunition. For he speaks
of the people at home, in the quiet corners of the Fatherland; he tells
the soldier in language that is of his profession, how the fear of the
Lord is a better arm than the truest-shooting _Zuendnadelgewehr_; how
preparedness for death and for what follows after death, is a part of his
accoutrement that the good soldier must ever bear about with him.

Herr Pastor has other functions than to preach to the living. The day
after a battle, his horse must be very tired before the stable-door is
reached. The burial parties are excavating great pits all over the field,
while others pick up the dead in the vicinity and bear them unto the brink
of the common grave. Herr Pastor cannot be ubiquitous. If he is not near
when the hole is full, the _Feldwebel_ who commands the party bares his
head, and mutters, "In the name of God, Amen," as he strews the first
handful of mould on the dead--it may be on friends as well as on foes. If
the pastor can reach the brink of the pit, it is his to say the few words
that mark the recognition of the fact that those lying stark and grim
below him are not as the beasts that perish. The Germans have no set
funeral service, and if they had, there would be no time for it here.
"Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of
the resurrection to eternal life, _durch unsern Herr Jesu Christe_. Amen;"
words so familiar, yet never heard without a new thrill.