Finally, here is a priest, Father Gilbert de Gironde, second lieutenant in the 81st infantry, who was killed on the seventh of December, 1914, at Ypres, writing his last letter.... For of the twenty-five thousand priests who went off at the beginning of the mobilization, three hundred were called military chaplains, the rest were officers, stretcher-bearers, or common soldiers--and note the 4,000 citations in the army orders which the "Journal Officiel" has published, which report the acts of courage and of bravery done by these priests on the battle field: To die young. To die a priest. To die as a soldier in the attack, marching to the assault in full sacerdotal garb, perhaps in the act of granting an absolution; to shed my blood for the Church, for France, for her Allies, for all those who carry in their hearts the same ideal I do, and for the others also, that they may know the joy of belief ... how beautiful that is, how beautiful that is! Catholics, Protestants, Jews, priests, ministers and rabbis, that is what they write. It is a belittling, a profanation, that, in spite of myself, I have separated and differentiated among them. For down there, in the bloody mud of the trenches, they are one body which lives together and dies together. There was a little Breton who, on the Battle field of the Marne, was shot in the chest. The death agony at once set in, and in his agony he asked for a crucifix. No priest happened to be on the spot, there was only a Jewish rabbi. The rabbi ran to get the crucifix, he brought it to the lips of the dying man, and he, in his turn, was killed!... In a little barrack in the hollow of one of the depressions at Verdun lived together a priest, a minister and a rabbi. We often saw the place. On the evening after a frightful battle, they were all three in the charnel house where the dead bodies are brought. They were surrounded by stretcher-bearers, who said to them: "We do not dare throw earth on the bodies of our comrades without a prayer being said over them." The Catholic priest asked to what faith they belonged. "We do not know. How can we find out? But can't you arrange among yourselves?" "Well, we shall bless them one after the other." And there in the bleeding night was seen the incomparable sight of the three men side by side, the Catholic, the Protestant and the Jew, reciting the last prayer and disappearing....