He was among the number of those who were off to the front, and his face had lit up when he heard his name called. "Thank Heaven! I was so afraid of being left behind." To be left behind was a kind of disgrace we felt ... and we old territorials who were to be sent to the hospitals in the west, felt it badly. The Abbé Duroy was already living it all in spirit. His eyes saw the near future and his heart beat with joy at the thought of his great work. He was going down to the terrible "là-bas," to anguish unspeakable and to death, and in his person, I thought I saw all the priests of France going towards the frontiers, invested with the divine mission of opening the gates to eternal life to those who were quitting this poor mortal life. When we had separated, in order to pack our traps, Duroy took me apart. "You are jealous," he said. "Why not?" "I understand. After all this new life is part of our very being. Do you think though that it was necessary to be mobilised in order to do what we are doing? For twenty years, always, we have been patriots ... soldiers who blessed and upheld." There was a bugle call. It was the first signal for departure. He held out his hand ... our eyes met and spoke the same great thought, the same great fear. I was the weaker man, and the question which wrung my heart, escaped to my lips. "When shall we meet again?" He, proud and stern at the thought of danger, repeated my words. "Shall we meet again?" Then he broke the short silence. "To die like that, and only thirty.... I'm afraid I don't deserve such a grace." Then becoming the true soldier he always was, he struck me on the shoulder and said-- "I've an idea, old friend. I'll write to you from 'là-bas,' as often as I can ... and from the impressions you get, joined to mine, I'm sure you'll be able to write some touching pages. I am your War Correspondent." He embraced me, and I felt that his promise was one of those which are kept. III--A PRIEST'S STORY OF THE MAN NOT AFRAID TO DIE It was night-time, and I could hear the hours striking, hours which would have been long if I had not beside me moaning and groaning, suffering to be consoled. We had had to wait for them for a fortnight, but there they were now, filling the great dormitories of a school which had been turned into a military hospital, where we had joined our post in the war. They suffer in silence, or when in the throes of a hideous nightmare, they scream and groan with the torture their mutilated bodies wrings from them. I went up to a bed over which the lamp shed a subdued light. There lay a young fellow of about twenty, awakened by the intensity of his suffering. I had seen him but a short time before on his stretcher, a poor broken thing, his eyes staring, with the horrors of his dreadful journey still pictured in them. What appalling scenes had I read in them. All the horrors of war had become present to me.