What she saw was infinitely more than what I could see. She had experienced in her own soul that this was holy ground. In happy days of childhood heaven seemed to lie here; she had come hither to be received, in white, into the holy fellowship; hither to be married; hither to dedicate her children at the sacred font. And when the burden of life was heavier than could be borne, how often had she come hither; and as she fell on her knees at the elevation of the Host, the very God seemed to fold her in the Eternal Embrace, and her troubles fled as morning mists before the sun. And when the war came, and the men went forth, and with them her sons, how often did she come softly to this sanctuary and dip her hand in the holy water at the door and cross herself, and bow toward the altar, and kneel and pray that they might be saved. In and out all day they came then, men and women, and they prayed for their own, and for France, and their prayers were as the moaning of the winds. * * * And now this! Nothing is left. Home and town and children and sanctuary are all overwhelmed in the one flood. And the Christ from the broken pillar gazes upon a perishing world. It is with her as with those of old, who fell under the heel of the oppressor and who cried: "Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation; our holy and our beautiful house where our fathers praised Thee is burned with fire, and all our pleasant things are laid waste." There is that in man which enables him to meet every blow of fate with unblanched face--save one. When the blow is aimed at his soul, then he shrivels. It was in her soul that this woman was smitten, as she saw the house of her God thus. And that is why there in the land of death the churches and cathedrals are all in ruins. To make the altars of Arras gaze on the clouds and the stars, and make the winds wail through the colonnades of Rheims, was deemed the surest and swiftest way of spreading terror and affright. So the devotées of Odin declared war upon God. For a little while the tribal deity and the belligerent dynast reign supreme. The homeless and bereft, the great multitude who are as those standing on the rubble-heap, are verily left with nothing but their eyes to weep with. It is amazing how soon one gets assimilated to the most horrifying environment. In a few days one can walk through a town which has been turned into heaps without even a shock of wonder, just as at home one reads the war news and the list of the dead without any realization. In these days we need to be stung broad awake now and then. A city in ruins becomes deadly monotonous--until one is wakened.