rception when
he exclaimed, "Ah, madame, it is your eyes which prevent you from
seeing!"

I heard some of the stories of the men. There was a captain who, after
he had been wounded and while there was yet time to save his sight,
insisted on being taken to his General that he might inform him about
a German mine. When his mission was completed, his chance of seeing
was forever ended.

There was a lieutenant who was blinded in a raid and left for dead
out in No Man's Land. Just before he became unconscious, he placed
two lumps of earth in line in the direction which led back to his
own trenches. He knew the direction by the sound of the retreating
footsteps. Whenever he came to himself he groped his way a little
nearer to France and before he fainted again, registered the direction
with two more lumps of earth placed in line. It took him a day to
crawl back.

There was another man who illustrated in a finer way that saying, "It
is your eyes which prevent you from seeing." This man before the war
was a village-priest, and no credit to his calling. He had a sister
who had spent her youth for him and worshipped him beyond everything
in the world. He took her adoration brutally for granted. At the
outbreak of hostilities he joined the army, serving bravely in the
ranks till he was hopelessly blinded. Having always been a thoroughly
selfish man, his privation drove him nearly to madness. He had always
used the world; now for the first time he had been used by it. His
viciousness broke out in blasphemy; he hated both God and man. He made
no distinction between people in the mass and the people who tried to
help him. His whole desire was to inflict as much pain as he himself
suffered. When his sister came to visit him, he employed every
ingenuity of word and gesture to cause her agony. Do what she would,
he refused to allow her love either to reach or comfort him. She was
only a simple peasant woman. In her grief and loneliness she thought
matters out and arrived at what seemed to her a practical solution.
On her next visit to the hospital she asked to see the doctor. She was
taken to him and made her request. "I love my brother," she said; "I
have always given him everything. He has lost his eyes and he cannot
endure it. Because I love him, I could bear it better. I have been
thinking, and I am sure it is possible: I want you to remove my eyes
and to put them into his empty sockets."

When the priest was told of her offer