Priests and ecclesiastical students are serving in the armies of the Republic in many capacities. Some are chaplains, regularly attached to the army ambulances and hospitals: the old virus of anti-clericalism was still active enough to delay their nomination till the eleventh hour. Others are doing the same work, but as volunteers under a scheme inaugurated by the late Comte de Mun. Still others are employed as stretcher-bearers or hospital attendants. The balance, the great majority, are fighting side by side with their fellow-citizens as plain soldiers of the Army of Liberation. This inclusion of priests in the ranks is peculiar to France. It dates from the adoption of the Two Years’ Law, when, on the shortening of the term of military service, all exemptions were suppressed. It is hardly to be denied that the measure was inspired less by logic than by malice. But in actual working out it has recoiled singularly on those who saw in it a lever for the disintegration of the Church. The soldier-priests have been the little leaven that has leavened the whole mass. It is impossible to estimate the total number engaged under all these heads. We do know that there are not less than twenty thousand occupied in the care of the wounded, and that sixty thousand is a conservative total estimate. They are sown through every corps of the Grand Army, and their influence would seem to be as great with the _gamin_ and the _gouailleur_ of Paris as with the simplest peasant of Brittany or Alsace. The first picture that seizes the imagination is the return of the soldier-priests from all the ends of the earth to give their answer to the crime of Prussia. From foreign universities, from Constantinople, Jerusalem, Madagascar, the Americas, from Ireland itself they came, trooping at the sound of the bugle of defence. It is, of course, foolish to suppose that all, or most of them, had been driven into enforced exile: most of them were voluntarily engaged in teaching or missionary work, but some were, in the truest and saddest sense, exiles. What matter! Their mother France had sinned, but her sins were as snow against the scarlet brutality of Prussia. M. Bompard, the French Ambassador at Constantinople, gives in his official report a vivid picture of the priests of every Order eagerly imploring facilities--almost quarrelling in their ardour--to return to France and the flag without a moment’s delay.