The death-lists of Europe hold 5,000,000 other names besides Lieutenant le Marchand’s.  Behind each name there marches with springless steps one or more figures shrouded in black.

A year later one of these figures arose from her burial alive, a whitened shadow of her former self.

“I know that I ought not to have collapsed, just as I know that I ought not to hate the Germans,” Marie wrote.  “I’m pulling myself together now, and I am trying to work and to forgive.  But my thoughts are always wandering out to just one spot—­that is where Robert lies.  When peace comes I’m going straight over there and with my own hands I shall dig through every trench until I find him.”

Tragic futility indeed!  One recompense for the colossal slaughter and the long war; few shall ever find their dead.

On a recent Sunday morning I stepped into a church of a Lake City of the West.  The organ was filling the large structure with its sounds; gradually out of the dim light came the face of the player.

A hard road had she traveled since last I saw her, a trim little blue-clad figure waving good-by from that balcony in Melun.  It was not strange that her face was white.  There was nothing strange either in the passion of that music.

These experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary had been first enacted in her own soul.  The organ was but giving voice to them.  There was a plaintive touch in the minor chords, as if pleading for days that were gone.  It climbed to a closing rapture, as if two who had parted here had, for the moment, hailed each other in the world of Souls.

Afterword

It seems sometimes as if the torch of civilization had been almost extinguished in this deluge of blood.  This darkening of the face of the earth has cost more than the blood and treasure of the race—­it has involved a terrific strain on the mind and soul of man.

The blasting of hundreds of villages, the sinking of thousands of ships, and the killing of millions of men is no small monument to the power of the human will.  Deplore as we may the sanguinary ends to which this will has been bent, it has at any rate shown itself to be no weakling.  We must marvel at the grim tenacity with which it has held to its goal through the long red years.

But now it is challenged by an infinitely bigger task.

The great nations sundered apart by this hideous anarchy have become hissings and by-words to each other.  One group has been cast outside the Pale to become the Ishmaels of the universe.  The purpose is to keep them there.

Yet try as we may we cannot live upon a totally disrupted planet without bringing a common disaster upon us all.  It may be a matter of decades and generations but eventually the reconciliation must come.

To start civilization on the upward path again, to make the world into a neighborhood anew, to achieve the moral unity of humanity, is that infinitely bigger task with which the human will is challenged.  As in the last years it has relentlessly concentrated its energies upon the Great War, now through the next decades and generations it must as steadfastly hold them to the Great Reconciliation.  The tragedy of it all is that humanity must go at this crippled by a hatred like acid eating into the soul.