“Rose-veiled one,” it now said to its angelic companion, “permit me to present to you my friend ‘X’, a Judge recently arrived from the planet Earth, who will consent I am sure to act as your cicerone over a section of territory where history is in the making. Ask him anything you will and he will answer you--if he can. He is still unlearned in the language of your distant star; but he can converse in thoughts with you whose coarsest vesture is a body of thought.” I expressed my pleasure at meeting the stranger, and asked if I should show it a battlefield. “I do not understand the idea--battlefield,” it answered; “but I should like to see it.” “You will understand far less when you have seen it,” smiled the Beautiful Being. It chanced that day that the opposing forces in France and Belgium were unusually active in the beginning of the Spring campaign, and I led my two friends to a point where they could watch the combat. “What are those beings down there sending back and forth?” asked the rose-veiled stranger. “Those objects are known as shells,” I replied. “Shells?” the stranger returned in bewilderment. The Beautiful Being answered for me. “Shells are elaborately convoluted houses in which our brothers of the great deep live and disport themselves.” The look of bewilderment increased on the face of the stranger. “My friend forgets,” I said, “that you know not the language of earth, where a word, an arbitrary symbol for an idea, may stand for two ideas very dissimilar.” “What are those objects that the beings down there are sending back and forth?” the stranger repeated. I have to translate its form of speech into ordinary English to make it intelligible. Literally, its communication would stand like this: “? Objects beings sending reciprocally?” From my long association with angels, both those with astral bodies and those without, such a form of speech is intelligible to me; and I answered, translating my cumbrous native idiom into the simpler language of ideas: “The objects that are hurled back and forth between those beings on the plain below us are explosive shells, with a marvelous power to shatter the forms of other objects and to scatter them in all directions.” “Is it a form of play?” asked the rose-veiled stranger. “It is not,” I answered. “It is war.” “War?” All the horror that in my mind is associated with the word war was conveyed by my thought to the mind of the angelic visitor, and its rosy veil grew pale with pain. “What is this strange emotion that I feel?” it asked. “Truly, were it not for your presence here, my friends, I should desire to go away.” “The emotion that you feel,” I said, “is a sympathetic reflection of the emotions of war.” “And what is war?” “A horrible passion felt mutually and indulged by two opposing aggregates of souls, by which they are enabled to overcome their natural pity and to destroy each other’s bodies in vast numbers.” The veil of the stranger grew almost white.