But that day I was four or five miles back from the front, and the weight of that horror of the horizon was heavy upon me. Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening. It was evening now, and getting dark, yet still the cruel unending work went on. Behind me quick red flashes of flame showed the position of the nearer French batteries, which till then one could only guess at from the sound of the guns. Far off in front brilliant flares shot up into the darkness over the trenches, that the men on both sides might be able to go on watching and killing all through the night. After all, was God in His heaven? Was all right with the world? I thought of General de Castelnau, the winner of that great victory in Lorraine, and his three dead sons. I thought of all those French and German lying there dead behind me, and the husbandless wives, and fatherless children, and brotherless sisters, and friendless friends, and sonless mothers, whose agonized prayers for their young lives had been answered by those silent graves. I thought of the killing that was going on through the night, and the killing that was still to come for weary months and perhaps for weary years. And then I thought of something else, of the splendid heroism and self-sacrifice of the women who prayed and suffered and the men who fought and fell, and of some words that I had seen before the light faded, written over one of the graves that I had passed—it makes no difference that the man buried there was a German, for surely German soldiers as well as French believe that they are fighting for the right—“Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” And that, it seems to me, when you get right up face to face with death, instead of standing and looking at it afar off, is the only possible meaning of the Battle of the Grand Couronné, and all the battles and all the horrors and all the suffering of the whole war. For all of us, even for the enemy, even for those who do not fight, it is a war of redemption, and the greatest and most hopeful war of redemption that the world has ever seen, and it will be won by those whose faith in what is right lasts up to death and beyond it. CHAPTER XV LUNÉVILLE