“There’s Stacey Collbran, too, who left a young sweetheart, and ull never know the love of wedded life because you had to be died for. Do you ever think of him when your Wife lies in your bosom, and say, ‘Reckon I’ll be good to my wife, since for my sake a poor chap never had his’?
“And there’s Fred Bourner, and Sid Viner, and Joe Kadwell, and Leslie Ades—they all went out to die for you, and they died, and you come here to remember them to-night; but in your hearts, which ought to be breaking with reverence and gratitude, you’re just saying, ‘It’s proper, it’s expedient that these men should die for the people, that the whole nation perish not.’
The minister’s voice hung paused for a minute. He leaned over the pulpit, his hands gripping the wood till their knuckles stood out white from the coarse brown. His eyes travelled up and down the pew-pods of staring heads, as if he expected to see contradiction or mockery or surprise. But the Sunday Street face is not expressive, and except for the utter stillness, Mr. Sumption might have been reading the chapel accounts.
“There’s my boy, Jerry Sumption; Maybe you thought I wouldn’t talk of him to-night, that I’d be ashamed, that I’d never dare mention his name along of your gallant boys. Besides, you say, What’s he got to do with it? He never died for the people. But you thought wrong. I’m not ashamed to speak his name along of Tom and Stace and Fred and Sid and Joe, and he hasn’t got nothing to do with it, either. For I tell you—_my boy died for_ _your boys_. He died as an example and warning to them, to save them from a like fate, and if that isn’t dying for them.... These are Mr. Archie Lamb’s very words: ‘Your son is dying so that other men may be warned by his fate and stick to the ranks and do their duty as soldiers; therefore, in that sense he has died for his country.’ I reckon it seems a big thing to shoot a boy just for going off to see his girl when the company’s marching; but if it weren’t done then other boys ud stop away and the regiment go to pieces. Mr. Archie and the other officers said, ‘It is expedient that one man should die for the regiment, that the whole army perish not.’...
“No! I am not ashamed of my boy! If he was led astray at the last moment by his evil, human passions, who shall judge him?—Not I, and not you. He did not desert because he was a coward, because he funked the battle before him. Listen again to Mr. Archie Lamb; he says, ‘Sumption is not a coward—I have seen him in action, and I repeat that he is as plucky as any one.’ And he joined up as a volunteer, too—he didn’t have to be fetched, he didn’t go before the Tribunal and say he’d got a bad leg, or a bad arm, and his father couldn’t run the business without him. He joined up out of free-will and love of his country. The Army was no place for him, for his blood was the blood of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns, which knows not obedience. When he joined he risked his life not only at the hands of the enemy but at the hands of his own countrymen, and it is his own countrymen that have put him to death, ‘that the whole nation perish not.’