“But it does matter. It makes agony and damnation in the world. It creates cruelty and tyranny, and all bloody things. Surely if we believe in God--anyhow in Christian ethics--this war is a monstrous crime in which all humanity is involved.” “The Hun started it... Let's go and give the glad eye to Marguerite.” At night, in moonlight, Amiens cathedral was touched with a new spirituality, a white magic beyond all words of beauty. On many nights of war I walked round the cathedral square, looking up at that grand mass of masonry with all its pinnacles and buttresses gleaming like silver and its sculptured tracery like lacework, and a flood of milky light glamorous on walls in which every stone was clear-cut beyond a vast shadow-world. How old it was! How many human eyes through many centuries had come in the white light of the moon to look at this dream in stone enshrining the faith of men! The Revolution had surged round these walls, and the screams of wild women, and their shrill laughter, and their cries for the blood of aristocrats, had risen from this square. Pageants of kingship and royal death had passed across these pavements through the great doors there. Peasant women, in the darkness, had wept against these walls, praying for God's pity for their hearts. Now the English officers were lighting cigarettes in the shelter of a wall, the outline of their features--knightly faces--touched by the moonlight. There were flashes of gun-fire in the sky beyond the river. “A good night for a German air raid,” said one of the officers. “Yes, a lovely night for killing women in their sleep,” said the other man. The people of Amiens were sleeping, and no light gleamed through their shutters. XIII