sing while they
make the shavings fly under the plane and the saw. They are building
wooden houses, and roofing them with tiles. Around them are poor people
whose features are stiff and grey like those of the dead. These are the
women, the old men, the children, the weaklings of our sweet France, who
have lived for months in damp caves and dens, till they look like
Lazarus rising from the tomb. But life is beginning to come back to
their eyes and their lips. The hands they stretch out to you tremble
with joy. To-night they will sleep in a house, in _their_ house. And
inside there will be beds and tables and chairs, and things to cook
with.... As they go in and look, they embrace each other, sobbing."

By June 1915, 150 "Friends" had rebuilt more than 400 houses, and
rehoused more than seven hundred persons. They had provided ploughs and
other agricultural gear, seeds for the harvest fields and for the
gardens, poultry for the farmyards. And from that day to this, the
adorable work has gone on. "_By this shall all men know that ye are My
disciples, if ye love one another_."

* * * * *

It is difficult to tear oneself away from themes like this, when the
story one has still to tell is the story of Gerbeviller. At Vitrimont
the great dream of Christianity--the City of God on earth--seems still
reasonable.

At Heremenil, and Gerbeviller, we are within sight and hearing of deeds
that befoul the human name, and make one despair of a world in which
they can happen.

At luncheon in a charming house of old Lorraine, with an intellectual
and spiritual atmosphere that reminded me of a book that was one of the
abiding joys of my younger days--the _Recit d'une Soeur_--we heard from
the lips of some of those present an account of the arrival at Luneville
of the fugitives from Gerbeviller, after the entry of the Bavarians into
the town. Women and children and old men, literally mad with terror, had
escaped from the burning town, and found their way over the thirteen
kilometres that separate Gerbeviller from Luneville. No intelligible
account could be got from them; they had seen things that shatter the
nerves and brain of the weak and old; they were scarcely human in their
extremity of fear. And when, an hour later, we ourselves reached
Gerbeviller, the terror which had inspired that frenzied flight became,
as we listened to Soeur Julie, a tangible presence haunting the
ruined town.

Gerbeviller