Page:Memorials of Capt. Hedley Vicars, Ninety-seventh Regiment by Marsh, Catherine, 1818-1912.djvu/127

118 guidings of the Divine hand, it will be scarcely necessary to point out the wisdom of that Providence which led him to Greece, and kept him there throughout the awful prevalence of the cholera and malignant fever — a visitation which, within the space of thirty-four days, deprived his regiment of one hundred and twenty of his ablest and finest men.

As no spiritual instruction was provided for either Protestant or Roman Catholic soldiers, the field was his own. He began his work by undertaking the command of funeral parties for other officers, who gladly relinquished to him a task so little congenial to their feelings. In this way he obtained frequent opportunities of addressing the living around the graves of the dead, warning them to flee from the wrath to come, and beseeching them to close at once with efforts of free pardon and mercy from that divine Redeemer who is "the life of them that believe, and the resurrection of the dead."

On the first of these solemn occasions his heart was too full for words, yet the tears which stifled his voice had an eloquence of their own for the brave men around him. They reckoned not the less confidentially on his dauntless courage in every hour of danger.

The solemn and tender tone of his own feelings communicated itself to them, and thus were their hearts opened to receive the message he so longed to deliver:

It was "the love of Christ constraining" him, and no mere sense of duty, which led Hedley Vicars to spend the greater part of his days, and often of his nights, in the pestilential air of the crowded hospitals —