“If I live for a hundred years,” writes the Archbishop of Laodicea, “I shall never forget the spectacle I witnessed at the station of Fribourg (Switzerland) during the days of mobilisation.... I saw a great crowd of compatriots who, with shouts of ‘France for ever!’ ‘Switzerland for ever!’ were streaming into the last train. Among them I noticed many young men wearing soutanes or other ecclesiastical costume. When I learned that they were expelled religious I could not forbear expressing to them my gratitude and enthusiasm. I shall never forget the generous eagerness with which they were flying to the help of France. They declared themselves ready to do their duty, their whole duty. A sympathetic crowd surrounded them, cheering heartily. I shall always have before my eyes that picture of waving handkerchiefs, of young manly faces, radiant with faith and hope. The mobilisation appeared to me in all its beauty ‘symbolised by a sword surmounted by a cross.’” So they returned, and, once in the field, their record is almost monotonous in its heroism. Mgr. Herscher truly describes the collection of incidents and letters assembled by M. Langlois as a “breviary of patriotism.” You find in it a cloud of witnesses testifying to the fashion in which, with the first roar of the guns, religion came back to honour. “There are neither pagans nor sceptics here,” writes one young soldier. “Everybody is glad, if he has five minutes, to spend them before the altar. Before the war many were ashamed to be seen kneeling or making the sign of the Cross; you find no one like that now.” “The cannon,” says another, “is a good converter.” “Nothing gives you the feeling of absolute dependence on God so well as twenty-four hours in the trenches.” “If my friends saw me now,” runs the confession of a Parisian, “they would certainly not recognize me, me the mocker who believed in nothing. I am transformed.” The chief anxiety of those who have strayed, and come back, is to let their people at home know that they died in the faith of Christ. “Tell my wife, father, to teach the little one her prayers. That is the best of all!” runs a typical last message. “I do not fear death,” writes a fatally wounded boy of twenty-two. “I have seen it and see it too close this moment: there is nothing horrid about it, for it leads to happiness.” The Abbé Morette, who served in 1870, is, in this war, an army chaplain. He gives graphic and touching pictures of the re-awakening.