At the commencement of the service the music was subdued, treble and alto voices recited canticles and chanted antiphons. Sometimes a clear soprano rang out alone. I could not understand the words, but one of the melodies recalled an air by Handel, a touching declaration of faith triumphant, a woman’s voice proclaiming that her Redeemer lives. Later, the character of the music changed. From a gallery at the Cathedral’s western end, a choir of men thundered out pæans of rejoicing, which rose in shattering crescendos, and surged up to the altar in waves of sonorous sound. The climax of the ceremony was reached when the Archbishop left the altar steps and knelt before the King. The old Primate’s work was done. This learned monk and priest of God was a Rumanian citizen. As such, he surrendered to his temporal sovereign the symbol of all Christendom, and his own most sacred charge. King Ferdinand received it reverently, and a Catholic Hohenzollern Prince stood as the Head of Church and State holding a jewelled cross. An unexpected movement followed. Most of the foreign diplomats and soldiers pressed round the Royal throne, and paid homage to both spiritual and temporal power by kissing first the crucifix and then the Monarch’s hand. This gesture was neither premeditated nor prompted by a spirit of Erastianism. It was the act of men under the influence of deep emotion. Something had touched their hearts; something, perhaps, which brought back memories of boyhood, when belief was ready, and young imaginations glowed, and youth was vowed to noble needs; something which stirred feelings numbed by contact with worldliness and cruelty on life’s rough way; something still fragrant and redolent of innocence, which they had lost long since and found awhile. To the peasant soldiers, the music, the incense and the vestments combined to make a beatific vision, a light to those who walked in darkness, and whose simple faith was strong and real. They believed implicitly in the second advent of a man who had been, and would be again--Wonderful, a Counsellor, a Good Shepherd, and a Prince of Peace. They had known sorrow and defeat, the enemy was in their land, famine and pestilence were ravaging their homes, but they were soldiers of the Cross and undismayed. More battles would be fought, battles without the pomp and circumstance of those in theatres less remote. The last heroic stand at Marasesti[39] would be made by humble men, who, this night throughout Moldavia, were met together for a festival of their Church, not to sing songs of lamentation, but to cry Hallelujah and Hosanna, to tell the joyful tidings--“Christ is risen.” CHAPTER XIV “WESTERNERS” AND “EASTERNERS” For many years before the “Great World War,” the German Army had been the most formidable fighting machine in existence. It had filled professional soldiers in all countries with envy and admiration, as the supreme expression of a warlike and disciplined race.