retching from the Alps to the sea. Only then did
the spirit of France draw breath for a moment, and the next flash as of
lightning showed her offering thanks and making supplications before the
white statue of Jeanne d'Arc in the apse of the great cathedral of Notre
Dame, sacred to innumerable memories. On the Feast of St Michael 10,000
of the women of Paris were kneeling under the dark vault, and on the
broad space in front of the majestic facade, to call on the Maid of
Orleans to % intercede with the Virgin for victory. It was a great and
grandiose scene, recalling the days when faith was strong and purer.
Old and young, rich and poor, every woman with some soul that was dear
to her in that inferno at the front--the Motherhood of France was there
to pray to the Mother of all living to ask God for the triumph of the
right.

"Jesus, hear our cry for our country! Justice for France, O God!"

And in the spirit of that prayer the soul of France still lives.

FIVE MONTHS AFTER

The next of the flashes as of lightning that revealed the drama of the
past 365 days came to us at Christmas. The war had then been going on
five months, showing us many strange and terrible sights, but nothing
stranger and more terrible than the changed aspect of warfare itself.
A battlefield had ceased to be a scene of pomp and of personal prowess,
with the charging of galloping cavalry, the clash of glittering arms,
and the advancing and retiring of vast numbers of soldiery. It was now a
broad and desolate waste, in which no human figure was anywhere visible
as far as the eye could reach--a monstrous scar on the face of the
globe, such as we see in volcanic countries, only differing in the
evidence of design that came of long, parallel lines of turned-up soil,
which were the trenches wherein hundreds of thousands of men lived
under the surface of the ground. Over this barren waste there was almost
perpetual smoke, and through the smoke a deafening cannonading, which
came of the hurling through the air of scythes of steel, called shells.
Sometimes the shells were burying themselves unbroken in the empty
earth, but too often they were scouring the trenches, where they were
bursting into jagged parts and sending up showers of horrible fragments
which had once been the limbs of living men.

Such was warfare by machinery as the world caught its first, full,
horrified sight of it between the beginning of August and the end of
December 1914. B