On November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, a day memorable to all, especially to the soldier, the roar of the Sims ceased, and "there was a great calm." While the tumult of this particular stage of the strife between right and wrong has died away in the distance, the spiritual lessons coming to me from my participation in the war have endured and will be a constant source of inspiration. Therefore I desire to share with others certain of these experiences, with the hope that thereby may be instilled confidence in the ability of God to hear and answer those who cry out to him in their time of need.
As I entered the war, and was faced with the need of protection, I realized that there would be situations where theory would be of no avail, and that if I was to be protected I must know something of God's law. The remark was made to me by a Christian Science friend, before I went to France, that my protection would always lie in my consciousness of good, but the practical unfoldment of this thought did not come to me with clearness until my second night in the trenches. We occupied a sector on the Marne River, northeast of Chateau-Thierry. There had been a very heavy bombardment by the enemy artillery that night, one large shell alighting just immediately back of the trench where I was located, and in a few minutes another directly in the trench, which proved fatal to three men and wounded and shell-shocked several others. A number of us heard the cries and went up the trench to carry the wounded back to where they could be given first aid. As I lifted one of the men to help carry him, the remark of my friend, that my protection would always lie in my consciousness of good, dawned upon my waiting thought with practical import. It came in this way: that in the act of carrying this fellow man, I was manifesting good, and by virtue of this fact I was conscious of good, and with this consciousness of good came the conviction that inasmuch as I was consciously manifesting good, I was at that moment an active idea of good, and that this consciousness placed me entirely beyond the reach of all destruction. To my thought was borne at that moment the wondrous and sublime thought of our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, who states in Science and Health (p. 192). "The good you do and embody gives you the only power obtainable. Evil is not power. It is a mockery of strength, which erelong betrays its weakness and falls, never to rise." I had risen in thought to some degree of realization of the all-power of good, thereby annulling the claim of evil as having power to come nigh me with its weapons of seeming destruction. I had not professed that I had the understanding to annul the seeming power of destruction of those weapons if they came, so my demonstration here was to prove that they could not come nigh me. We carried the man back in safety.
Another instance of protection occurred some time later, while we were in the Argonne forest. One evening several of us were taken from the trench to be placed on guard at a crossroads, at which place was a building used as a first aid dressing station. We worked the guard in relays, and while off duty we slept in this building. One night the enemy artillery began to shell about ten o'clock, and continued throughout the night with only brief intermittent lulls in the bombardment. They had two lines of artillery fire, the shells passing along both sides of the building, and alighting so close that when they burst we could hear the flying shrapnel sprinkle on the roof, but the building was not struck directly by a shell, although to human sense it seemed impossible that it could escape. As I awoke the next morning, with a sense of safety, almost as a voice these words of Scripture came to my thought, "And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said. Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not." More than words did this mean to me that morning. The Lord, as we know Him, is not a magnified human personality but is divine Mind, infinite good; so there in the midst of the Argonne forest, with mortal mind at its seeming zenith of power, with all of the implements and weapons of destruction that the human mind could conceive of, Principle was governing, directing, and had guided me to safety, and so the Lord was in that place, and I knew it not before, because of doubt, but now with the proof that I had had, I was convinced of it.
