villages of Lorraine. But to do them justice, they are most impressed by the way our men practice their religion. Two companies of our regiment jam a village church—aisles, sanctuary, sacristy, porch. A battalion shows its good will by filling the churchyard, the windows being ornamented by rough martial visages which don’t look exactly like those of the placid looking saints in the stained glass above—but I feel that the saints were once flesh-and-blood people themselves, and that they have an indulgent, perhaps even an admiring eye, on the good lads that are worshipping God as best they can. There is no doubt anyway about the opinion of the good priests who are carrying on the work of the dead and gone saints. They are full of enthusiasm about our fellows. What attracts them most is their absolute indifference to what people are thinking of them as they follow their religious practices. These men of yours, they tell me, are not making a show of religion; they are not offending others; they touch their hats to a church, or make the sign of the Cross, or go to Mass just because they want to, with the same coolness that a man might show in taking coffee without milk or expressing a preference for a job in life. They run bases with scapulars flying, and it don’t occur to them that they have scapulars on, any more than they would be conscious of having a button of their best girl or President Wilson pinned to their shirts—they may have all three. Come to think of it, it is a tribute not only to our religious spirit, but to the American spirit as a whole. The other fellows don’t think of it either—no more than I do that one of our Chaplains who is closest to me in every thought and plan wears a Masonic ring. We never advert to it except when some French people comment on our traveling together—and then it is a source of fun. I often drop in on soldiers of other outfits around their kitchens or in the trenches, or during a halt on the road, and hear confessions. Occasionally Catholic soldiers in country regiments, with the small-town spirit of being loth to doing anything unusual while people are looking at them, hold back. Then my plan is to enlist the co-operation of the Protestant fellows, who are always glad to pick them out for me and put them in my clutches. They have a lot of sport about it, dragging them up to me as if they were prisoners; but it is a question of serious religion as soon as their confession begins, the main purpose of the preliminaries being simply to overcome a country boy’s embarrassment. It proves, too, that the average American likes to see a man practice his religion, whatever it may be.