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Show SAYS WAR HELPED RELIGION Big Fight Made Soldiers Better Men, Is Assertion Made by Man Who Knows Them. The American soldier came out of the war with more religion than he went in, according to Rev. Henry Russell Rus-sell Talbot, canon of the National cathedral at Washington, who arises to defend the doughboy from the libel that the "war ruined him." "He is a better man for having been in the army," asserts the canon, referring refer-ring to the veteran, the Stars and Stripes states. Canon Talbot was senior chaplain of the First division of the American expeditionary ex-peditionary forces. In a communication communica-tion to national headquarters of the American Legion at Indianapolis he admits the American, as he saw him in France, was "uncommonly timid in the exercise of his religion. He was frightened at his own religious shadow or he might have been grossly ignorant ignor-ant of the content and practice of his religion." But as the First division's senior chaplain, the canon was in charge of all the private belongings of the 1,800 Americans lulled in the ten days' fighting fight-ing in the Argonne, and in nine out of every ten of the men's kits found a crucifix, scapular, prayerbook or testament. testa-ment. "And in those days," Canon Talbot writes, "the First division was not carrying anything it did not deem essential.' "There was a kind of collectivism which outruns the ordinary standards of honesty," declares the canon, "but underneath there was implicit, if not explicit, reverence for the Son of Man." |