d of singing. But above the voices of the Germans
there came sometimes a series of piercing cries like the screeching of
an owl in a terrible plaint, followed by strange and bloodcurdling
laughter. It was the voice of a mad woman who was one of those
captured from neighbouring villages and brought into the trenches by
the Germans. One day the German soldiers carried her the length of
their own trenches. Only her head was visible above the ground. She
wore a German helmet above the wild hair which blew in wisps about
her death-white face, and it seemed like a vision of hell as she
passed shrieking with the laughter of insanity.

One turns from such horrors to the heroism of the French soldier, his
devotion to his officers, his letters to that chere maman before whom
his heartis always that of a little child, to the faith which saves men
from at least the grosser brutalities of war.

9

One of the tragic ironies of the war was that men whose lives had
been dedicated to the service of Christ, and whose hands should be
clean of blood, found themselves compelled by the law of France
(and in many cases urged by their own instincts of nationality) to
serve as soldiers in the fighting ranks. Instead of denouncing from
every pulpit the shamefulness of this butchery, which has made a
mockery of our so-called civilization and involved all humanity in its
crime, those priests and monks put themselves under discipline
which sent them into the shambles in which they must kill or be killed.
When the mobilization orders were issued, the call to the colours was
sent to young cures and abbes throughout the country, and to monks
belonging to religious orders banished by its politicians. Jesuits and
Dominicans, Franciscans and Carmelites, who had been exiled from
France for conscience' sake, hurried back at the first summons,
dispensed from that Canon Law which forbids them to shed blood,
and as Frenchmen, loving their country though it expelled them,
rallied to the flag in the hour of peril. They were Christian priests, but
they were also patriots, and Christianity is not so instinctive in its
emotion as the spirit of nationality which, by some natural law, makes
men on one side of a frontier eager to fight till death when they are
challenged by men across the boundary line, forgetting their
principles of peace and the command, "Thou shalt not kill," in their
loyalty to their own soil, crown, or national ideas. There were twenty
t