‘‘There are no atheists in foxholes,’’ so it has been said. And there
are many stories that recount experiences of men who were there and who sought a higher
power when the chips were down. Many incidents have been related where men were saved from sudden death by
a bullet because it was stopped by a Testament.
A story in the Sept. 20, 1899,
issue of ‘‘The Salisbury Truth’’ says that ‘‘a praying man
is considered a better fighter than the ‘bad’ man.’’
H.J. Cleveland, in the Chicago
Times-Herald, said it was ‘‘the sneering comment of British generals in the
early days of the Revolutionary War that the American soldiers prayed before
battle.’’
The instances were numerous during
the Civil War where both Confederate and Union forces were halted before the strife for an
invocation. Gen. Stonewall Jackson rode with his Bible, Cleveland says.
Aside from his own slight
experience with the army when it entered Cuba, Cleveland said he had solicited nurses and
surgeons for stories of the praying soldier.
‘‘In the frontier land
where I was reared the ‘praying’ man was more feared as a fighter, when
necessity demanded fight, than was the so-called ‘bad’ man. One of Sibley’s
captains in that famous 1863 pursuit after the Sioux always sent his men into battle with
the injunction:
‘‘Pray and
fight.’’
This story came out during the
Rough Riders reunion at Las Vegas. One of the regiment, an Indian Territory man, was
slightly wounded at Las Guasimas. On his way to the rear he was wounded again and came to
the sheltering bluff of a creek feeling that death was near at hand. Try as he would, his
strength was not sufficient to carry him under the lee of the bluff. To stay where he was,
seemed at that moment an impossibility. In his struggles and endeavor to get over the
bank, there came to him a dim recollection of something that had been taught him when he
was a boy:
‘‘God bless me and help
me to do right – God make me a good boy. God keep me – ‘’
A loosened bit of earth gave way
and down the bank into safety he went. He lay on his back there, his feet in the water of
the stream, his eyes fixed on the face of his adjutant, who through fright had deserted
his post and hidden. The trooper appreciated the situation, for his prayer ended:
‘‘And kill that blasted
maverick now.’’
One of the Chicago Red Cross
nurses sent to Siboney cared for a Nebraska boy who was wounded under the colors of the
Fourth Infantry. One afternoon when he was convalescent he was describing to her his
sensation when first under fire. She asked him:
‘‘Did you feel like
praying?’’
His answer was:
‘‘I prayed for five
minutes after the firing commenced.’’
Much interested, the nurse asked
him the nature of his prayer. He replied with a laugh:
‘‘All that I could say
was ‘Oh, Lord, Oh, Lord’ over and over again, but I guess He understood it, for
it was meant for prayer.’’
Cleveland says he was in the
cemetery at Montauk, the pitiful waste of sand where the soldier dead were laid, searching
for a trace of a young soldier, a Chicago boy who was missing, when the burying squad
brought up the body of an unknown soldier for interment. No minister was present, no one
to hold any kind of service over this body that was going to the grave without the
slightest mark of identification. The rough laborers charged with the duty of burial did
not think this was quite right. Hardened as they were to their duties, they still wished
for a bit of prayer over every body before the sand was shoveled in upon it. They appealed
to a young lieutenant who was crossing the ground. To the surprise of all, he came, stood
by the rude box in which lay the dead and, uncovering his head, prayed. As prayers go, it
was not much, and could not be under the circumstances, but the act of the unknown officer
praying over the unknown dead had so much of the divine in it that not a man present but
felt his eyes moisten and that tightening of the throat which comes when emotions surge.
There are stories also of men who
claimed to be atheists that did an about face when the lead started flying. |
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