Testimony of Healing September 1, 1917 Issue

I wish to bear testimony to what Christian Science has...

Rupert S. Guntlin-Williams with contributions from Edith Hill

I wish to bear testimony to what Christian Science has done for me in the last year. I was captain of a British man-of-war, which was torpedoed by a German submarine in the southeastern Mediterranean. When the ship gave her last plunge, I dived overboard, but was immediately sucked back again under the foc'sle awning, some twenty feet under water. I had no sense of fear whatever: my heart seemed full of love, and the knowledge that God was with me even in the depths of the sea. This kept all my faculties clear, and I was able to dive deeper still, so as to clear the awning and regain the surface practically none the worse. The submarine came up and made us all prisoners, took us in to the coast of Cyrenaica, and turned us over to the Senussi—a bloodthirsty and ultra-fanatical Muhammadan sect, to whom human life is of no more account than that of a sheep.

For nineteen weeks we were prisoners in the Libyan Desert, exposed to every privation,—naked, hungry, barefooted, sick, burnt by the sun, and chilled by the rain and the bitter cold of desert nights,—our lives always in great peril. After four months I escaped, and covered half the hundred miles of waterless desert which separated us from our friends. I was recaptured, and was in extreme peril of being instantly murdered; but I was preserved from death, although I was flogged with an elephant hide whip, stoned, and spat upon; but remembering him who suffered without a cause, I was hardly conscious of pain.

At the end of five months, the country being blockaded, the last of the provisions ran out : for some time we had been on a quarter of a pound of food a day and were in a state of great weakness and reduced to skin and bone. Apparently only a few days more of life remained, as nothing human could help us. We realized that God was our only help, and the inevitable answer came. The British forces, burning an Arab camp, discovered a letter of mine written to the Senussi commandante two months previously. It stated our condition and the name of the Wells where we were. The British captured a prisoner who had been there thirty years before, and with him as a guide they covered with armored cars and ambulances one hundred and twenty miles of trackless desert in the enemy's country; found, rescued, fed, and clothed us, and returned another one hundred and twenty miles—all within twenty hours. During our captivity there were no medical comforts of any kind, and I believe I am correct in saying I was the only one who never had dysentery or any kind of illness: five died of starvation. My Christian Science friends were working for me all the time I was a captive, and the wife of another prisoner was also a Scientist.

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