egan Mass, Chaplain, the gun fire seemed to ease a bit, and a
comparative zone of quiet prevailed where we were gathered."

"I shall know after this, Colonel," I laughingly replied, "what is
bringing you to Mass--to get into a zone of quiet!" Permit me to add
here, however that the good Colonel needed no urging to attend Mass. I
never met a better Christian overseas nor a more gallant loyal comrade
than Colonel Cummings.

The remaining hours of that day were spent in ministering to the living
and burying the dead. Along that battle swept front the Chaplain was
always gladly welcomed and his divine Message reverently received. Death
in its thousand ghastly forms, ever impending, ever threatening,
impressed with serious religious thought the consciousness of even the
most careless. In direct proportion to the coming and going of danger
was the ebb and flow of the tide spiritual. "Haven't you noticed,
Chaplain, an improvement in my language of late? I sure have been trying
to cut out swearing." Often would some officer or enlisted man--of any
or no church membership--so remark, and who had hitherto been prone to
sins of the tongue.

On such occasions two thoughts would come to me--the reflection of
Tertullian that "The soul of man is by nature religious;" and the
admonition of Ecclesiastes 7:40, "Remember thy last end and thou shalt
never sin." Far into that All Saints night I heard Confessions, and was
edified with the large number who approached Holy Communion All Souls
morning.

In burial work, we always made it a point, where it was at all possible,
to bury the enemy dead as reverently as our own. We would gather their
poor shell-torn bodies, often in advanced stages of decomposition, and
place them in graves on sheltered hillsides, safe from gun fire,
carefully assembling in Musette bags their belongings, which we would
forward to the Prisoner of War Department. One day, while so assembling
the scattered remains of four dead Germans, evidently killed by the same
shell, one of our boys of the 34th Infantry, Sam Volkel by name, who
before the war lived in my old parish at Harvey, passed by. This good
boy's parents had been born in Germany. When he saw the reverent care we
were giving those four of the enemy dead, he came up to me and with
tears streaming down his smoke and dust-covered face exclaimed,
"Father, God bless you."

"De mortuis nil nisi bonum" is a principle of conduct dating back to Him
who of old decl