A black-robed woman was sobbing before a grave and pitying statue of St.-Anne—sixteenth or seventeenth century, I didn’t know which—and a pale, tiny child with a frightened look was standing by her. Again I thought on the oceans of fear children have passed through in this war, and again I besought God to take care of His world. As I passed up the central aisle I saw two American soldiers kneeling before the high altar. That spot of khaki and its young, unmistakable silhouette under the gray vaulting of that old church suddenly seemed momentous beyond anything I had ever seen. It was the country of my birth and my love pursuing its gigantic destiny down an endless vista, crowded with uncountable khaki-clad forms, men with souls. The two anonymous soldiers became typical of each and every Miles Gloriosus since the world began, and as they knelt there on the altar steps I knew that they had been laid on that other dreadful altar of the world’s sin.... An open door showed us the way to a lovely Gothic cloister of the sixteenth century, surrounding a tree- and flower-planted court. It had a few fresh chippings on its _belle patine_, the results of a bomb which fell in it a few months ago. Long lines of soldiers’ socks were hung on strings across one corner of it, and soldiers were sitting in a little room-like corridor, leading I know not where, reading newspapers, whistling and writing. Then, out through a delightful sixteenth-century door into the streets, the loveliness of Toul imagined rather than really perceived, for the rain was falling again. Khaki-clad men of the _Division marocaine_, together with blue-clad companions, were threading their way through the narrow streets, and there were few women and children. I thought how I had seen the two towers of the church shining from afar as I passed by in the train that June evening with the two Bretons whose fate I shall never know.... Did the one from Nantes return to hold his first-born in his arms? Or the fiancé return to consummate his nuptials? Then I caught sight of my own two soldiers standing at the door of a little tobacco-shop. I suppose it was the nearest resemblance to anything familiar in Toul, and they were rather cuddling up to it. They smiled broadly when they heard themselves addressed in what they termed the “blessed lingo,” and called it “some luck.”