rang out. ... It seemed to me as I
stood there in this hall, filled with stale smoke and woman's scent,
that I smelt blood, and gunpowder, and heard through the music of
the Marseillaise the shouts of hoarse voices, charging with the
bayonet, the screams of wounded, and then the murmur of a
battlefield when dawn comes, lighting the tattered flags of France.

20

The soldiers of France in that strange land called la-bas had one
consolation which should have helped them a little--did help them, I
think, more than a little--to endure the almost intolerable misery of
their winter quarters at the front in one of the wettest half years within
living memory. They stood in the waterlogged trenches, shivering and
coughing, they tramped through cotton-wool mists with heavy
overcoats which had absorbed many quarts of rain, they slept at
nights in barns through which the water dripped on to puddled straw,
or in holes beneath the carts with dampness oozing through the clay
walls, or in boggy beetroot fields under a hail of shrapnel, and their
physical discomfort of coldness and humidity was harder to bear than
their fear of death or mutilation.

But throughout those months of mud and blood a spirit came to visit
them in their trenches, and though it could not cure frozen feet or put
a healing touch for men spitting blood and coughing their lungs away,
it warmed the hearts of men who otherwise would have been chilled
to a moral death. The love of women and of all those people who had
not been called upon to fight went out to those poilus at the front, in
waves of emotion which reached as far as the advanced trenches. By
millions of letters, which in spite of an almost hopeless muddle of the
postal service did at last reach the soldier, they knew that France, the
very heart of France, was full of pity and hero-worship and yearning
for them. By the gifts which came to them--after months of delay,
sometimes--not only from their own kinsfolk but from unknown
benefactors, school children, convents, societies, and all classes of
men and women, they knew that their sufferings were understood
and that throughout the country there was a great prayer going up--
from freethinkers as well as from Catholic souls--that the soldiers of
France might be blessed with victory and that they might have the
strength to endure the cruelties of war.

It may be thought that this sentiment would not comfort a man lying
on his stomach as sentinel on o