“For hours I crawled, or wiggled, along, dropping into a chalk-pit or a shell-hole every few moments, for it was like hell under that liquid fire, Fritzie’s aërial bombs and the machine-gun fire; in fact, it seemed as if every kind of projectile had been let loose, for now the Germans were mad clean through. Finally, being too exhausted to make any further headway, I crept into a shell-hole, where I lay for a day and a night, lying on my face most of the time, playing dead, for the German fiends would sneak out into No Man’s Land at night after a bombardment, and kill every wounded enemy soldier they could find. “What did I think about, you ask, Miss Nathalie, while lying in that shell-hole?” Philip smiled a little sadly. “Well, at first I was crazed with thirst and hunger, and the cold—oh, it was something fierce. And then the doubts and misgivings that had assailed me at times, as to whether there was a God in heaven, returned with renewed force. I dumbly felt that my faith was leaving me, for why this useless slaughter of men’s bodies, this agonizing devil’s gas, this torturing of the aged and weak, this violating of womanhood, this maiming of little, innocent children? Ah, the agony of body was nothing compared to the agony of my soul, as I lay in that hole. “Then that night—there was no moon, and everything was a dead calm, for a lull had come in fighting—I turned over, face upward, to ease the aching that racked my body. As I lie gazing up at the stars,—they seemed unusually bright,—something white suddenly flashed before me, and then I saw a face bend down and gaze at me. It was a marvelously beautiful face, with such calm serenity of expression as the eyes smiled into mine, that a strange peace came into my soul, my pains were eased, I was filled with a wonderful joy, and—then I knew;—it was the face of the Great White Comrade,—the face of Christ! “It may have been a delusion from overwrought nerves,—I may have been dreaming,—I don’t know, for there had been great talk among the soldiers of seeing the white apparition of Christ on the battlefield. He was said to have appeared to the soldiers, showed them His bleeding side and hands, and then the suffering ones had felt a wonderful peace come into their souls, and their very agonies had made them triumphant in the thought that as He had died to make men holy, so He had given them the great privilege of suffering and dying to make men free. No, I didn’t see any bleeding side, or the nail-prints on the hands, but I saw Christ’s face, and, oh, it was Heaven!