TO FRANCE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3251, 5 July 1916, Page 50

TO FRANCE.

THE MOVING OF ANZAO. A PADRE WHO SAID THE RIGHT THING. [Copyright Reserved by the Crown.] (From Captain Bean, Official Correspondent with the Australian Fores.) British Headquarters (France), April 8. The sun glared from a Mediterranean sky and from the surface of the Mediterranean Sf.a. The liner heaved easily to a slow sweil. In the waist of the ship a densely-packed crowd of sunburnt faces were turned up towards a speaker, wiio leaned over the rail, of the promenade deck above. Beside the speaker was a slight figure with three long rows of ribbons across the left breast. Every man in the A.I.F. is as proud of those ribbons as the loader who wears them so modestly. Australian ships had been moving through those waters for days. High over one's head, as one listened to that speaker, there sawed the wireless aerial, backwards and forwards across the silver sky. Only yesterday that aerial had intercepted a stammering signal from far, far away over the brim of the world, "Sons,"' it ran, " L. 0.5." There followed half-articulate fragments of a latitude. That evening, about sundown, we ran mto the shreds of some ocean conversation about boats' crews and about someone who was still absent. Just that broken fragment in the buzz of the wireless conversation that runs around the world. Days afterwards we heard that she had not been an Australian or any other transport. Somewhere in those dazzling seas there was an eye twitching for us though, just above the water, and always waiting, waiting, waiting , . . it would have been a rich harvest, that crowded deck below one. If the monster struck just there he could not fail to kill many with the mere explosion. But I don't believe a man in the crowd gave it, a thought. The strong-, tanned, clear shaven farce under the old slouch hats were all gazing up in rapt attention at the speaker. For he was telling them the right thing. THE RiGH'i THING. Ho was not, a, regular chaplain —there was no regular padre in that snip, and it seemed that there would be no church parade until there was discovered amongst the reinforcements officers one bttle oiiioer who w;ts a padre m Tasmania, but who was going to the front as a fighting man. One iiad heard other padres speak to troops on the eve of their plunging into a groat enterprise, when the sermon had made jne wish that one only had the power and gift to seize that wonderful opportunity as it might be seized, and have done v.itti texts and doctrines und speak to the men as men. livery man there had his ideals — he was giving ids life, as like as not, because however crude the exterior there was a eye within which saw truly and surely through the mists. And now when they stood on the brink of the last great sacrifice, could not ho Ktizu upon those truths . . . But this time one simply stood and wondered. For that slip of a figure in khaki, high up there with one band on the staunchion and the other tapping the rail, was telling them a thousand times better than one could ever have thought it oneself exactly the things one, would have longed to gay. WHY WE ARE HERE. Ho told them first, his voice firm with conviction, that God had not populated this world with saints but with ordinary human men; and that they need not. fear that because they might not have been churchgoers or lived what the world called religious lives, therefore God would desert them in the danger and trials, and perhaps the death to which they went. "If i thought that God wished any man to be tortured eternally," he said, "to bo tortured for all time and not to have any hope of heaven, then I would go down to hell cheerfully, with a smile on my lips, rather than worship such a being. I don't know whether a man put it beyond the power of God to help him. But I know this, that, whether you are bad or good, or religious or not religious, God is with you all the time, trying to help you. "And what have wo got to fear now," he went on, raising his eyes for a moment from the puckered, interested brown foreheads below him, and looking out over shimmering distant silver of the horizon, as if away over there, over the edge of the world, he could road what, the next few months had in store for. them. "We know what we have come for, and we know that it is right. We have all read j of the things that have happened in France. :

We know that the Germans invaded a peaceful country and brought these horrors into it. We know how they tore up treaties like so much paper; how they sank the Lusitania and showered bombs on harmless women and children in London and in the villages of England. We eame of our own free wills—we eame to say that this sort of thing shall not happen in the world so long as we are in it Wo know that we are doing right, and I tell you that, on this mission on which we have come, so long as every man plays the same and plays it cleanly, he need not fear about his religion—for what else is his religion than that. "Play the game and God will be with you>—never "AND WHAT IF WE DIE?" "And what if some of us do pass over before this strugglo is ended—what is there* in that? If it were not for I lie clear ones whom ho leaves behind him, mightn't a man almost pray for a death like that. The newspapers' too often odl us heroes, but we know wo are not heroes for having come, and we do not want to be called heroes. We should have been less than men if we hadn't." The rapt unconscious approval in all those weather-scarred upturned faces made it quite obvious that they were with him in every word. In those simple sentences this man was speaking the whole soul of Australia. He looked up for a second to the side sky as clear as his own conscience, and then looked down at them again. " Isn't it the most wonderful thing that could ever have happened," he went on. '"Didn't every one of us ask, boylike, to go about the world as they did in the days of Drake and Raleigh, and didn't it seem almost beyond hope that that adventure would ever come- to us. And isn't that the very thing that has happened, and we are on that great enterprise, going out across the world, and with no thought of gain or conquest, but to h'dp to right a great wrong. What else do wo wish except to go straight forward at iliQ enemy—with our dear ones

there behind us and God above us, and our friends on each side of us, and only the enemy in front of us—what more do we wish than that?" There were tears in many men's eves when he finished—and that does not often happen with Australians. But it happened th.s time—far out there on a distant sea. And that was because he had put his linger, just for one moment, straight on the heart ol tno nation.