tunate than he, because they had seen actual
fighting. He respected them because of their wounds, and he wanted to
help them. So he lifted that rich, sweet, sympathetic tenor voice
until the great hut rang with the old, old song, and hearts were melted
everywhere. I saw, back in the audience, a group of nurses with bowed
heads. They knew what the rosary meant to those who suffer and die in
the Catholic faith. They, too, had memories of that beautiful song. A
group of officers, including a major, all wounded, listened with heads
bowed.
As I sat on the crude stage and saw the effects of his magical voice on
this crowd I got to thinking of what this war is meaning to that fine
understanding of those who count the beads of the rosary and those who
do not. I had seen so many examples of fine fraternal fellowship
between Catholic and Protestant that I felt that I ought to put it down
in some permanent form.
There is a true story of one of our Y. M. C. A. secretaries who was
called to the bedside of a dying Catholic boy. There was no priest
available, and the boy wanted a rosary so badly. In his half-delirium
he begged for a rosary. This young Protestant Y. M. C. A. secretary
started out for a French village, five miles away, on foot, to try to
find a rosary for this sick Catholic boy, and after several hours'
search he found a peasant woman whom he made understand the emergency
of the situation, and he got the loan of the rosary and took it back
through five miles of mud to the bedside of that Catholic lad, and
comforted him with the feel of it in his fevered hands and the hope of
it in his fevered soul. When I heard this story it stirred me to the
very fountain depths, but I have seen so much of this fine spirit of
service in the Y. M. C. A. since then that I have come to know that as
far as the Y. M. C. A. is concerned all barriers of church narrowness
are entirely swept away.
I have had most delightful comradeship since I have been in France in
one great area as religious director with two Knights of Columbus
secretaries and one father--Chaplain Davis--all of whom say freely and
eagerly: "We have never had anything but the finest spirit of
co-operation and friendship from the Y. M. C. A."
"Why," added Chaplain Davis, a Catholic priest, "why, the first Sunday
I was here, when I had no place to take my boys for mass, a secretary
came to me and offered me the hut. It has always been that way."
The story
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