o word that embraces all these things but beauty.

We stopped in the village to take up our wounded from the Convent. The
nuns brought us through a long passage and across a little court to the
refectory, which had been turned into a ward. Bowls steaming with the
morning meal for the patients stood on narrow tables between the two
rows of beds. Each bed was hung round and littered with haversacks,
boots, rifles, bandoliers and uniforms bloody and begrimed. Except for
the figures of the nuns and the aspect of its white-washed walls and its
atmosphere of incorruptible peace, the place might have been a barracks
or the dormitory in a night lodging, rather than a convent ward.

When we had found and dressed our men, we led them out as we had come.
As we went we saw, framed through some open doorway, sunlight and vivid
green, and the high walls and clipped alleys of the Convent garden.

Of all our sad contacts and separations, these leave-takings at the
convents were the saddest. And it was not only that this place had the
same poignant and unbearable beauty as the place we had just left, but
its beauty was unique. You felt that if the friends you had just left
were turned out of their house and garden to-morrow, they might still
return some day. But here you saw a carefully guarded and fragile
loveliness on the very eve of its dissolution. The place was fairly
saturated with holiness, and the beauty of holiness was in the faces and
in every gesture of the nuns. And you felt that they and their faces and
their gestures were impermanent, that this highly specialized form of
holiness had continued with difficulty until now, that it hung by a
single thread to a world that had departed very far from it.

Yet, for the moment while you looked at it, it maintained itself in
perfection.

We shall never know all that the War has annihilated. But for that
moment of time while it lasted, the Convent at Ecloo annihilated the
nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, every century between now and the
fifteenth. What you saw was a piece of life cut straight out of the
Middle Ages. What you felt was the guarded and hidden beauty of the
Middle Ages, the beauty of obedience, simplicity and chastity, of souls
set apart and dedicated, the whole insoluble secret charm of the
cloistered life. The very horror of the invasion that threatened it at
this hour of the twentieth century was a horror of the Middle Ages.

But these devoted women did not