hen a man is in an attack he can not write to
those he loves. He must be content with thinking of them.
And if time passes and she hears nothing from me, let her
live in hope. Help her. And if you learn at last that I have
fallen on the field of honor, let the words come from your
heart that will console her, my dear Jeanne.

This morning I attended mass and communion with faith. It
was held some yards away from the trenches. If I am to die,
I shall die a Christian and a Frenchman.

I believe in God, in France and in Victory. I believe in
beauty and youth and life. May God guard me to the end. But,
Lord, if my blood is useful for victory, may Thy will be
done.

Finally, here is a priest, Father Gilbert de Gironde, second
lieutenant in the 81st infantry, who was killed on the seventh of
December, 1914, at Ypres, writing his last letter.... For of the
twenty-five thousand priests who went off at the beginning of the
mobilization, three hundred were called military chaplains, the rest
were officers, stretcher-bearers, or common soldiers--and note the
4,000 citations in the army orders which the "Journal Officiel" has
published, which report the acts of courage and of bravery done by
these priests on the battle field:

To die young. To die a priest. To die as a soldier in the
attack, marching to the assault in full sacerdotal garb,
perhaps in the act of granting an absolution; to shed my
blood for the Church, for France, for her Allies, for all
those who carry in their hearts the same ideal I do, and for
the others also, that they may know the joy of belief ...
how beautiful that is, how beautiful that is!

Catholics, Protestants, Jews, priests, ministers and rabbis, that is
what they write. It is a belittling, a profanation, that, in spite of
myself, I have separated and differentiated among them. For down
there, in the bloody mud of the trenches, they are one body which
lives together and dies together.

There was a little Breton who, on the Battle field of the Marne, was
shot in the chest. The death agony at once set in, and in his agony he
asked for a crucifix. No priest happened to be on the spot, there was
only a Jewish rabbi. The rabbi ran to get the crucifix, he brought it
to the lips of the dying man, and he, in his turn, was killed!...

In a little barrack in the hollow of one of the depressions at Verdun
lived