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 sense of the nearness and
all-pervadingness of the war became even more vivid. Every road
branching away to our left was a finger touching a red wound: