_ CHAPTER ONE. THE COURAGE OF SELF-CONQUEST
II. EFFACING SELF
"Every man that falls must understand beforehand that he is a dead man and nothing can save him. It is useless for him to cry out, and it may, by giving the alarm, cause the enterprise to fail."
This was the message to his men of the officer to whom Napoleon committed the capture of Mt. Cenis.
The historian tells us that at one point in the ascent of a precipitous track, three men fell. "Their bodies were heard bounding from crag to crag, but not a cry was heard, not a moan. The body of one hero was recovered later. There was a smile on his lips."
How that record of the silence succeeded by a smile grips the heart, for it was not the false courage that plays to the grandstand, but the deeper, truer courage that sinks self for the good of others, and does this not merely because it is a part of the game, but with the gladness that transfigures life.
Such courage does not wait for some great occasion for exhibiting itself; it is revealed in the midst of the humdrum routine of daily life--a routine that is especially trying to those who have been looking forward to some great, perhaps dramatic service.
A young man of seventeen entered the navy, with his parents' consent, as an apprentice. When he left home he had dreams of entering at once on a life of thrilling adventure where there would be numberless opportunities for the display of high courage. At the end of a month a friend asked him how he liked life at the navy yard. "Fine!" was the reply. "What are you doing?" was the next query. "They haven't given me anything but window washing to do yet," he replied, with a smile that was an index of character.
A newspaper writer has told of a college student nineteen years old who enlisted in the navy. He was sent to one of our naval stations and told to guard a pile of coal. As the summer passed he still guarded that coal pile. He wrote home about it:
"You know, dad, when we were little shavers, you always rubbed it into us that anything that was worth doing at all was worth doing as well as it could be done. I've been standing over that coal pile nearly three months now, and it looks just exactly as small as it did when I first landed on the job."
"He was relieved from the coal pile at last and promoted," said the writer who told of him. "At the same time the government gave him a last chance to return to his college work. He thought it over carefully. He realized that America was going to need trained men as never before, but still, he decided, the best service that he individually could give was the one that he had chosen. He had a few days of leave before going on to his next assignment, and he hurried back to his home. He found that his summer task was a matter of town history, and he had to face a good deal of affectionate raillery about his coal pile. Of course he did not mind that. But his answer revealed his spirit:
"'You may laugh, but that coal pile was all right. I'll admit it got on my nerves for a bit, but I figured it out that while I was taking care of that coal pile I was releasing some other fellow who knew things I didn't know, and who could do things I couldn't do. I'm ready to stand by a coal pile till the war ends, if that's where I can help the most.'"
"That is the spirit that will conquer because it is the spirit that never can be conquered," was the comment made on the incident. "There is no self in it--only consecration to duty; no seeking for large things--only for an opportunity to serve whenever the call comes. That is the spirit that is growing in America to-day--and only through such spirit can we accomplish our great task in the life of the world."
The man who really desires to serve his fellows does not think of declaring that he will not do humble tasks, but he demands that the work he is asked to do shall be needed.
A young man who was seeking his life work made known his willingness to be a shoe-black, if he could be convinced that this was the work God wanted him to do. An immigrant in New York City read in the morning, "Lord, my heart is not haughty nor mine eyes lofty." Then he went out to sweep a store, and he swept it well. It is worthy of note that the young man who was willing to be a shoe-black became one of the foremost men of his generation, and that the immigrant became the pastor of a leading city church. But a far more important fact is that the quality of the service given counted more in their minds than the character of the employment.
The service of the man who would be worth while in the world must partake of the spirit of the successful figure on the baseball diamond or the football gridiron: readiness to do everything, or anything--or to do nothing, if he is so directed--in the interests of the team. It must take a leaf from the book of General Pershing and his fellow officers who, in a time of stress for the Allies, were willing and eager to brigade their troops with the soldiers of France and England, thus losing the identity of their forces in the interest of the great cause for which they stood. It must learn the lesson taught by the life of Him who emptied Himself for the sake of the world--and did it with a smile. _