ont, where troops and wounded are packed in thousands into
villages meant to house four or five hundred; and we admired the
skill and devotion with which he had dealt with the difficulty, and
managed to lodge his patients decently.

We came back to the high-road, and he asked us if we should like to
see the church. It was about three o'clock, and in the low porch the
cure was ringing the bell for vespers. We pushed open the inner
doors and went in. The church was without aisles, and down the nave
stood four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets. In almost every
one lay a soldier--the doctor's "worst cases"--few of them wounded,
the greater number stricken with fever, bronchitis, frost-bite,
pleurisy, or some other form of trench-sickness too severe to permit
of their being carried farther from the front. One or two heads
turned on the pillows as we entered, but for the most part the men
did not move.

The cure, meanwhile, passing around to the sacristy, had come out
before the altar in his vestments, followed by a little white
acolyte. A handful of women, probably the only "civil" inhabitants
left, and some of the soldiers we had seen about the village, had
entered the church and stood together between the rows of cots; and
the service began. It was a sunless afternoon, and the picture was
all in monastic shades of black and white and ashen grey: the sick
under their earth-coloured blankets, their livid faces against the
pillows, the black dresses of the women (they seemed all to be in
mourning) and the silver haze floating out from the little acolyte's
censer. The only light in the scene--the candle-gleams on the altar,
and their reflection in the embroideries of the cure's chasuble--were
like a faint streak of sunset on the winter dusk.

For a while the long Latin cadences sounded on through the church;
but presently the cure took up in French the Canticle of the Sacred
Heart, composed during the war of 1870, and the little congregation
joined their trembling voices in the refrain:

"_Sauvez, sauvez la France,
Ne l'abandonnez pas!_"

The reiterated appeal rose in a sob above the rows of bodies in the
nave: "_Sauvez, sauvez la France_," the women wailed it near the
altar, the soldiers took it up from the door in stronger tones; but
the bodies in the cots never stirred, and more and more, as the day
faded, the church looked like a quiet grave-yard in a battle-field.

After we had left Sainte Menehould the