them, that when it falls at last the war will be
over, and France will be victorious.

That is rank superstition, you say? Aye, it may be! But in the region
of the front everyone you meet has become superstitious, if that is
the word you choose. That is especially true of the soldiers. Every
man at the front, it seemed to me, was a fatalist. What is to be will
be, they say. It is certain that this feeling has helped to make them
indifferent to danger, almost, indeed, contemptuous of it. And in
France, I was told, almost everywhere there were shrines in which
figures of Christ or of His Mother had survived the most furious
shelling. All the world knows, too, how, at Rheims, where the great
Cathedral has been shattered in the wickedest and most wanton of all
the crimes of that sort that the Germans have to their account, the
statue of Jeanne d'Arc, who saved France long ago, stands untouched.

How is a man to account for such things as that? Is he to put them
down to chance, to luck, to a blind fate? I, for one, cannot do so,
nor will I try to learn to do it.

Fate, to be sure, is a strange thing, as my friends the soldiers know
so well. But there is a difference between fate, or chance, and the
sort of force that preserves statues like those I have named. A man
never knows his luck; he does well not to brood upon it. I remember
the case of a chap I knew, who was out for nearly three years, taking
part in great battles from Mons to Arras. He was scratched once or
twice, but was never even really wounded badly enough to go to
hospital. He went to London, at last, on leave, and within an hour of
the time when he stepped from his train at Charing Cross he was
struck by a 'bus and killed. And there was the strange ease of my
friend, Tamson, the baker, of which I told you earlier. No--a man
never knows his fate!

So it seemed to me, as we drove toward Arras, and watched that
mysterious figure, that God Himself had chosen to leave it there, as
a sign and a warning and a promise all at once. There was no sign of
life, at first, when we came into the town. Silence brooded over the
ruins. We stopped to have a look around in that scene of desolation,
and as the motors throbbed beneath the hoods it seemed to me the
noise they made was close to being blasphemous. We were right under
that hanging figure of the Virgin and of Christ, and to have left the
silence unbroken would have been more seemly.

But it was not long before th