was one of those gray
and rainy days which rather suit the Gothic. The clouds were leaden,
like the solid blue-gray lead of the spires and the jewelled windows;
the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping
with damp; and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were
scoured with old rains and new. I went into the round, deep porch with
many doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain.
I also found a notice of services, etc., and among these I found the
announcement that at 11.30 (that is about half an hour later) there
would be a special service for the Conscripts, that is to say, the draft
of young men who were being taken from their homes in that little town
and sent to serve in the French Army; sent (as it happened) at an awful
moment, when the French Army was encamped at a parting of the ways.
There were already a great many people there when I entered, not only of
all kinds, but in all attitudes, kneeling, sitting, or standing
about. And there was that general sense that strikes every man from a
Protestant country, whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or
likes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing was "going on all the
time"; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual process, as if it
were a sort of mystical inn.

Several tricolours were hung quite near to the altar, and the young men,
when they came in, filed up the church and sat right at the front.
They were, of course, of every imaginable social grade; for the French
conscription is really strict and universal. Some looked like young
criminals, some like young priests, some like both. Some were so
obviously prosperous and polished that a barrack-room must seem to
them like hell; others (by the look of them) had hardly ever been in so
decent a place. But it was not so much the mere class variety that most
sharply caught an Englishman's eye. It was the presence of just those
one or two kinds of men who would never have become soldiers in any
other way.

There are many reasons for becoming a soldier. It may be a matter of
hereditary luck or abject hunger or heroic virtue or fugitive vice; it
may be an interest in the work or a lack of interest in any other work.
But there would always be two or three kinds of people who would never
tend to soldiering; all those kinds of people were there. A lad with red
hair, large ears, and very careful clothing, somehow conveyed across
the church that