Piled in the yard were knapsacks, nose-bags, equipment, arms, boots, tents, all the belongings of the wounded Germans. Here the sight of the blood and mud reminded one of the horror of combat and of crime. Heavy boots thudded on the polished floors where formerly women’s slippers had glided, lightly and silently. The peaceful little chapel, so full of the sweetness of the Virgin, as well as of memories of hours of ecstasy and prayer, had been profaned. The _prie-Dieu_ were overthrown and pushed away into corners, giving place to mattresses for the Teuton soldiers, whose hoarse moans and cries profaned the sanctity of the place. The enemy within those walls had driven God from His sanctuary. The sisters had themselves been hustled, threatened, frightened, their sacred calling barely sufficing to protect them. They could not escape in pious meditation from the agony of the battle, for the din of combat still shocked their ears, and great numbers of wounded had begun to flow in, displaying their hideous wounds, soiling the floor with blood and mud, staining the sheets, blankets, even the mattresses. Nurses, doctors, officers, men even, succeeded each other, demanding and requiring to be taken in and tended immediately; and the poor sisters had lost their heads on account of the threats and the sight of this terrible work of death and destruction. Sometimes, while rapidly crossing a ward from which the jailer was absent, one, with her great, sad, despairing eyes full of compassion, would look for a moment stealthily at one of her dear French soldiers and shake her head. Then, without saying a word, in her anguish of heart and soul, she would press her hands to her lips to repress a sob, and wipe the tears from her eyes. But these sufferings were not deemed sufficient; the sisters had not yet come to the end of their long ordeal of torments. One fine morning they were enlisted in a German sanitary corps and placed under the orders of a “Superior,” a German who had just arrived. She took the reins of Government in hand with a strong grip, and from that time on the sisters were obliged to obey this stranger in matters spiritual as well as material. Their country and their God were taken from them; they were obliged to bend the knee before the God which the Germans brought with them in their savage invasion, and from whom they never part. Written in relief on the buckles of their belts was the arrogant device: “Gott mit uns.” * * * * *