, he laughed derisively at her
for a fool. Then the reason she had given for her intended sacrifice
was told to him, "Because I love him, I could bear it better." He fell
silent. All that day he refused food; in the eternal darkness, muffled
by his bandages, he was arriving at the truth: she had been willing
to suffer what he was now suffering, because she loved him. The hand
of love would have made the burden bearable and, if for her, why not
for himself? At last, after years of refusal, the simplicity of her
tenderness reached and touched him. Presently he was discharged from
hospital and taken in hand by the teachers of the blind, who taught
him to play the organ. One day his sister came and led him back to his
village-parish. Before the war, by his example, he was a danger to
God and man; now he sets a very human example of sainthood, labouring
without ceasing for others more fortunate than himself. He has
increased his efficiency for service by his blindness. Of him it
is absolutely true that it was his eyes that prevented him from
seeing--from seeing the splendour that lay hidden in himself, no less
than in his fellow creatures.

So far I have sketched in the main what the war of compassion is
doing for the repatries--the captured French civilians sent back from
Germany--and for the refugees of the devastated areas, who have either
returned to their ruined farms and villages or were abandoned as
useless when the Hun retired. To complete the picture it remains to
describe what is being done for the civilian population which has
always lived in the battle area of the French armies.

The question may be asked why civilians have been allowed to live
here. Curiously enough it is due to the extraordinary humanity of
the French Government which makes allowances for the almost religious
attachment of the peasant to his tiny plot of land; it is an
attachment which is as instinctive and fiercely jealous as that of
a cat for her young. He will endure shelling, gassing and all the
horrors that scientific invention has produced; he will see his
cottage and his barns shattered by bombs and siege-guns, but he will
not leave the fields that he has tilled and toiled over, unless he
is driven out at the point of the bayonet. I have been told, though
I have never seen it, that behind quiet parts of the line, French
peasants will gather in their harvest actually in full sight of the
Hun. Shells may be falling, but they go stolidly