At our mess, we have queer little things of glass to rest knife and fork on, while the dishes are being changed; and last night at dinner, when the captain's orderly assigned one pilot to a particularly ticklish mission, an irrepressible American youth who was dining with us picked up one of these knife-rests (shaped exactly like a holy-water sprinkler), stood up very solemnly, made the sign over his victim, and sprinkled a few drops on his head. Amid roars of laughter every one at the table stood up in turn and did likewise. A harmless joke to us, but I am not sure of its good taste to a Frenchman. If I had known France before the war I could decide better a question that constantly occurs to me: "Has France grown more religious with war?" The educated Frenchman is certainly the most intelligent, the most skeptical, the least inclined to take things on trust of all men, yet on the whole I am inclined to believe that religious feeling (by no means orthodox religion) has grown and is growing. In peace times, death seems a vitally important thing, to be spoken of with awe and to be dreaded, perhaps as the end of the game, if you chance to be a materialist. All that is changed now. You go to Paris on leave, you spend two or three days delightfully with Bill or Jim or Harry, a very dear friend, also in on leave from his battery, regiment, or squadron. A week later some one runs up to you with a long face. "Bill got crowned on Thursday," he says; "joined a Boche patrol by mistake and brought down before he saw the crosses. Poor old cuss." You sigh, thinking of the pleasant hours you have passed with Bill--your long talks together, his curious and interesting kinks of outlook, the things which make personality, make one human being different from another. Somehow your thoughts don't dwell on his death as they would in peace-times--a week or a month later your mind has not settled into taking for granted his non-existence. Next time you visit Paris, you hasten to his former haunts--half expecting to find him absorbing a bock and expounding his peculiar philosophy. Is there a life after death? Of course there is--you smile a little to yourself to think you could ever have believed otherwise. This, I am confident, is common experience nowadays. The belief that individuality ceases, that death is anything but a quick and not very alarming change, is too absurd to hold water. It is a comforting thought and gives men strength to perform duties and bear losses which in ordinary times would come hard. I have just been made popotier--I don't know what you call it in English, but it means the individual who attends to the mess: buys provisions, wine, and so forth, makes out menus, keeps accounts, and bosses the cook. A doubtful honor, but one of which I am rather proud when I think that a crowd of French officers have entrusted to me the sacred rites of the table. I was never much of a gourmet, but what little I know stands me in good stead.