"battleground" of the history-books. And here a real above-ground
battle of the old obsolete kind took place, and the French, driving
the Germans back victoriously, fell by thousands in the trampled
wheat.

The church of Menil is a ruin, but the parsonage still stands--a
plain little house at the end of the street; and here the cure
received us, and led us into a room which he has turned into a
chapel. The chapel is also a war museum, and everything in it has
something to do with the battle that took place among the
wheat-fields. The candelabra on the altar are made of "Seventy-five"
shells, the Virgin's halo is composed of radiating bayonets, the
walls are intricately adorned with German trophies and French
relics, and on the ceiling the cure has had painted a kind of
zodiacal chart of the whole region, in which Menil-sur-Belvitte's
handful of houses figures as the central orb of the system, and
Verdun, Nancy, Metz, and Belfort as its humble satellites. But the
chapel-museum is only a surplus expression of the cure's impassioned
dedication to the dead. His real work has been done on the
battle-field, where row after row of graves, marked and listed as
soon as the struggle was over, have been fenced about, symmetrically
disposed, planted with flowers and young firs, and marked by the
names and death-dates of the fallen. As he led us from one of these
enclosures to another his face was lit with the flame of a gratified
vocation. This particular man was made to do this particular thing:
he is a born collector, classifier, and hero-worshipper. In the hall
of the "presbytere" hangs a case of carefully-mounted butterflies,
the result, no doubt, of an earlier passion for collecting. His
"specimens" have changed, that is all: he has passed from
butterflies to men, from the actual to the visionary Psyche.