Hours after the officers begin to turn up after various adventures. They seem surprised to see me in first. 'Our padre is the limit,' says the colonel. 'Chuck him into the centre of Darkest Africa, and he would strike out for home.' They glare at me with vengeful jealousy, but they have to confess I got supper on the way with the help of the cook. Hot coffee melts them. It is professional jealousy. I tell them we ought to have a few non-combatants to settle this war. We're good pals after all, and I know they would not care for a padre who got lost; worse still, they wouldn't want one who didn't _go in_ with them at all. There's nothing like sticking up to these fine young fellows now and again. Mutual admiration, tempered by strong opinions on irrelevant questions. The colonel is jubilant because our battalion is right in now without a casualty. Others, both going in and getting out, have, unfortunately, not been so lucky. Bed made at last. Fritz is still letting off fireworks. Now to get to my dug-out. I walk quietly to the left behind a wall of sand-bags, then going through an opening, I run smartly for the hole, for machine-gun bullets are splitting the air. I have a bag in front of my dug-out, and a sheet of corrugated iron to keep in the light. All night long the guns boom, but you sleep all the same. When we get our papers up a day afterwards, we read of this particular night a neutral paragraph, headed, 'A Quiet Night on the Western Front.' II NOTRE DAME DE DÉLIVRANCE From city homes—from country homes we came; From mother's love and father's gift we came, A wind most terrible blew o'er earth's seas; It waved a smouldering ash, and blazed up war; The smoke and heat of that great Hell drew us, And from our lives we came to live, to live. From sluggish routine, sluggish wrong we came. From heedless walks, from ageing rust we came --we called it life. 'Twas not! We came to live. Out of the profound, profound we'll come, out, up; Out of the deep we'll come, not from the shallows. H. H. V. CROSS, London Rifle Brigade. 'A Young Soldier's De Profundis.' II NOTRE DAME DE DÉLIVRANCE At the gate of a ruined farm in our sector in Flanders is a little chapel to 'Our Lady of Deliverance.' It is seventy years old. The brickwork at one corner is broken down by shell-fire, but the ancient picture above the altar, and the altar also, are intact.