, has been dug there. The upturned roots of an old tree
that a bursting shell had desecrated was just in front. "Tap! Tap!
Tap!" came the sounds of Boches at work somewhere near and underground.
It is needless to say that this was a Silhouette of Silence, and that a
certain Y. M. C. A. secretary was glad when it was all over and he got
back where he belonged.

[Illustration: The upturned roots of an old tree were just in front.]

The beautiful columns of the Madeleine bask under the moonlight. Paris
was never so quiet. The silence of eternity seemed to have settled
down over her. As one looked at the Madeleine under that magical white
moonlight he imagined that he had been transported back to Athens, and
that he was no longer living in modern times and in a world at war. It
was all so quiet and peaceful, with a great moon floating in the
skies----

But what is that awful wail that suddenly smites the stillness as with
a blow? It seems like the wailing of all the lost souls of the war.
It sounds like the crying of the more than five million sorrowing women
there are left comfortless in Europe. It is the siren. An air-raid is
on. The "alert" is sounding. The bombs begin to fall. The Boches
have gotten over even before the barrage is up. Hell breaks loose for
an hour. No battle on the front ever heard more terrific cannonading
than the next hour. The barrage was the heaviest ever sent up over
Paris. The six Gothas that got over the city dropped twenty-four bombs.

The terrific bombardment, however, now as one looks back, only serves
to make the preceding silence stand out more emphatically, and the
Madeleine, basking in the moonlight the hour before, more beautiful in
its silhouette of grace and bulk against the golden light.

A month on the front lines with thunder beating always, a month of
machine-gun racket, a month of bombing by Gothas every night, a month
of crunching wheels, a month of pounding motors and rumbling trucks, a
month of marching men, a month of the pounding of horses' hoofs on the
hard roads of France, a month of sirens and clanging church-bells in
the _tocsin_, and then a day in the valley of vision, down at Domremy
where Jeanne d'Arc was born, was a contrast that gave a Silhouette of
Silence to me.

One day on the Toul line, a train by night, and the next morning so far
away that all you could hear was the singing of birds. Peasants
quietly tended their flocks. Children pl