e whispered.
There was something written on the coffin that his mind reeled to
entertain. Without quite knowing how he came to be there, O'Hagan found
himself bending over the coffin. He read the lettering, and it was:

_Hilaire O'Hagan ob. 1696 aetat 35.
Parva domus, magna quies._

He sank down on his knees with a childish sob. Sometimes the old church
seemed absolutely still, and the only sound to be heard was the sighing
of the night breeze below him in the pines, but sometimes the place
seemed full of muffled movements, and once O'Hagan could have sworn that
the large carved handle of the door turned. Even as he stood there he
heard steps just outside, and with a sudden horror, he saw the heavy
door slowly open. A priest stood in the open doorway with an inscrutable
smile on his lips--the same clean-shaven man with a long aquiline nose
and singularly square chin, that he had seen before in his dreams.

"Brother," he said, in a moved voice. "You must go back and help your
comrades. There is no peace for you yet. Yes, brother, I know it is
written that we shall rest from our labours--but the beginning of our
rest is not yet. _We_ must go and help them in the firing line
yonder----"

"No, no, holy man!" O'Hagan pleaded. "I have had enough.... There is
hell over there."

"They are calling us, don't you hear them--the living and the dead----"

O'Hagan could see those great green flashes that burst in the sky so
near to him. He could almost hear the angry zipping of high explosive
shrapnel close over his head. God! how he hated it all!

"How hard it is, Father, to make these children understand!" came softly
from the priest's lips.

O'Hagan's regiment had retired to their trenches in good order. They
were some of those trenches round about Ypres, and all the world has
read how the Germans battered and delivered terrific infantry attacks on
this part of our line without cessation. A certain morning, about six
o'clock, the Huns decided to deliver a sharp attack, and there was
"considerable artillery activity" on the part of the German guns. Such
activity was spoken of in the trenches as "raising the lid off Hell."
There was a lull after about an hour's rain of every kind of missile
that man has invented to batter his brother with. Then the Huns came on
in earnest. Some reached the trenches only to be met with a murderous
fire: they fell in little huddled heaps in the blood and the mud and the
slime of