s to pace these stones again where five, six, seven
centuries before they had walked to worship God, in joy or in despair,
or to show their beauty of young womanhood--peasant girl or princess--to
lovers gazing by the pillars, or to plight their troth as royal brides,
or get a crown for their heads, or mercy for their dead bodies in
velvet-draped coffins.

Our soldiers went in there, as many centuries before other English
soldiers, who came out with Edward the Black Prince, by way of Crecy,
or with Harry the King, through Agincourt. Five hundred years hence,
if Amiens cathedral still stands, undamaged by some new and monstrous
conflict in a world of incurable folly, the generation of that time will
think now and then, perhaps, of the English lads in khaki who tramped
up the highway of this nave with their field-caps under their arms, each
footstep leaving the imprint of a wet boot on the old flagstones, awed
by the silence and the spaciousness, with a sudden heartache for a
closer knowledge, or some knowledge, of the God worshiped there--the
God of Love--while, not far away, men were killing one another by
high explosives, shells, hand-grenades, mines, machine-guns, bayonets,
poison-gas, trench-mortars, tanks, and, in close fighting, with short
daggers like butchers' knives, or clubs with steel knobs. I watched the
faces of the men who entered here. Some of them, like the Australians
and New-Zealanders, unfamiliar with cathedrals, and not religious by
instinct or training, wandered round in a wondering way, with a touch
of scorn, even of hostility, now and then, for these mysteries--the
chanting of the Office, the tinkling of the bells at the high
mass--which were beyond their understanding, and which they could not
link up with any logic of life, as they knew it now, away up by Bapaume
or Bullecourt, where God had nothing to do, seemingly, with a night raid
into Boche lines, when they blew a party of Germans to bits by dropping
Stoke bombs down their dugout, or with the shrieks of German boys, mad
with fear, when the Australians jumped on them in the darkness and made
haste with their killing. All the same, this great church was wonderful,
and the Australians, scrunching their slouch-hats, stared up at the tall
columns to the clerestory arches, and peered through the screen to the
golden sun upon the high-altar, and touched old tombs with their muddy
hands, reading the dates on them--1250, 1155, 1415--with astonishment