It must not be thought that faith comes overnight as a free gift. It is a long and slow process of many difficult steps. There may be first the actual literal crumbling, unknown in peace-time, of one's solid surroundings, to be repeated perhaps again and again until the old habit of reliance upon them is uprooted. Then comes the realization that this life at the front has but two possible endings. The first is to be so disabled that a man's fighting days are over. The other is death. Instant death rather than a slow death from wounds. Every man hopes for a wound which will send him home to England. That, however, is only a respite, as his return to France follows upon his convalescence. The other most important step is the loss of one's friends. It is not the fact of actually seeing them killed, for in the chaos and tumult of a battle the mind hardly registers such impressions. One's only feeling is the purely primitive one of relief, that it is another and not one's self. It is only afterwards, when the excitement is over, and a man realizes that again there is a space of life, for him, but not for his friend, that the loneliness and the loss are felt. He then says to himself, "Why am I spared when many better men have gone?" At first resentment swallows up all other emotions. In time, when this bitterness begins to pass, the belief that somehow this loss is of some avail, carries him a little farther on the road to faith. This all comes to the man who before the war believed that the world was made for his pleasure, and who treated life from that standpoint. All that he wanted he took without asking. Now, all that he has he gives without being asked. Woman, too, gives more than herself. She gives her men, her peace of mind and all that makes her life worth living. The man after all may have little hope, but while he is alive he has the daily pleasures of health, vitality, excitement, and a thousand interests. A woman has but a choice of sorrows: the sorrow of unbearable suspense or the acceptance of the end. Yet it needed this war to show again to women what they could best do in life: to love their men, bear their children, care for the sick and suffering, and learn to endure. It has taught them also to accept from man what he is able or willing to give, and to admit a higher claim than their own. They have been forced to put aside the demands and exactions which they felt before were their right, and to accept loneliness and loss without murmur or question.