In my fancy I saw a lot of able-bodied men thus engaged while those whose spiritual destinies they had elected to shape were being slaughtered on battlefields, struggling with wounds and disease in hospitals, contending with cold, thirst, hunger, and indescribable discomfort. What was the purpose of it, what benefit did it mediate, what enlightenment flowed from it? If Petronius was a good man, if he loved his fellow men, and if he did all that was within his power to do to make them better men, more capacious for a full life here and more worthy of eternal life, why should they not allow him to enjoy his reward in the bosom of the Lord? How can they enhance his happiness, what does mankind gain by taking the semblance of that which once formed a framework for his spirit and transferring it from one vessel to another while mumbling or chanting over it? What deep symbolism attaches itself to this attempt to stay nature in gathering the ashes of Petronius to their ultimate destiny? Would not these men give a better account of their stewardship to their Master were they to devote their time and their strength and their minds to the betterment of the physical and spiritual lot of those poor, desolate, forsaken unfortunates with whom I spent the afternoon--a trainload of men who had been imprisoned in an enemy country and who were returning to Italy to die of the dreadful disease that had been thrust upon them by those insatiate monsters of cruelty, the Austrians? I have rarely spent two hours more steeped in misery than I did that afternoon at Forte Tiburtino, where I went to visit the enormous hospital constructed around that old fort. It was intended to be used for temporary concentration of the sick and wounded soldiers sent from the front, until their disorders and diseases could be interpreted sufficiently to indicate where they should be sent for most speedy restoration to health. The protracted inactivity on the battlefronts of Italy had allowed the hospital to remain for many months unutilized. When Austria decided to send back to Italy a number of the men captured in the Caporetto disaster, upon whom she had thrust tuberculosis through starvation and every conceivable deprivation, it was decided to use this hospital for their shelter until they should die or be sufficiently nurtured to be sent to parts of the country whose climate is favorable to recovery from that disease. Two or three times a week a trainload of two hundred or more of these pitiful creatures arrived, many of them in a dying state. As a rule, they had been _en route_ for a week, and, though the Swiss Red Cross and the Italian Red Cross both attempted to make some provision that would contribute to their comfort, very little evidence of their efforts was to be seen.