I usually manage to get to two different towns for my Church services Sunday mornings. General Lenihan always picks me up in his machine and goes with me to my early service, at which he acts as acolyte for the Mass, a duty which he performs with the correctness of a seminarian, enhanced by his fine soldierly face and bearing and his crown of white hair. The men are deeply impressed by it, and there are few letters that go home that do not speak of it. He brought me back from Cohons this morning and dropped me off at Percey, where I had a later Mass. These French villagers are different from our own home folks in that they want long services; they seem to feel that their locality is made little of, if they do not have everything that city churches can boast, and I sometimes think, a few extras that local tradition calls for. It is hard on me, for I am a Low Church kind of Catholic myself; and besides “soldier’s orisons” are traditionally short ones. The only consolation I have here in Percey is that the old septuagenarian who leads the service for the people sings in such a way that I can render thanks to Heaven that at last it has been given to my ears to hear raised in that sacred place the one voice I have ever heard that is worse than my own. I called on Donovan this evening and found him sitting in a big, chilly chamber in the old chateau in front of a fire that refused to burn. He had had a hard day and was still busy with orders for the comfort of men and animals. “Father,” he said, “I have just been thinking that what novelists call romance is only what men’s memories hold of the past, with all actual realization of the discomforts left out, and only the dangers past and difficulties conquered remaining in imagination. What difference is there between us and the fellow who has landed at the Chateau in Stanley Weyman or Robert Stevenson’s interesting stories; who has come in after a hard ride and is giving orders for the baiting of his horse or the feeding of his retinue, as he sits, with his jackboots pulled down, before the unwilling fire and snuffs the candle to get sufficient light to read his orders for the next day’s march.” I get much comfort from the Major’s monologue. It supplies an excellent romantic philosophy with which to face the sordid discomforts which are the most trying part of war. BAISSEY _February_ 8th, 1918 Over today and dined at Hurley’s mess. Pat Dowling told of a rather mysterious thing that happened to him while he was a Sergeant in the regular army. He was sent from one post to another, a distance of two hundred miles, with a sealed letter which he delivered to the Commanding Officer, who opened it, read it, and said: “Sergeant, you will return to your own post immediately.” “I have often wondered,” said Pat, “what could have been in that letter.” “I can tell you,” said Tom Martin, in his quiet way. “Well, what was in it?” “That letter read, ‘If you like the looks of this man, keep him.’” LONGEAU