This is far from an exact translation, but the idea and the spirit have been faithfully preserved.  The “Mouchoir” was always a bit more squeamish than the average, rollicking trench journal, for it was issued by a group of medical service men who were almost all priests.  Indeed, there were some issues that combined satire, puns, and piety in a terrifying manner.  Its editors printed it in the cellar of the church, using a simple sheet of gelatine for their press.

I wandered in to see the church.  The usual number of civilians were to be seen, and a generous sprinkling of soldiers.  Through the open door of the edifice the sounds of a mine-throwing competition at the Bois occasionally drifted.  The abbe, a big, dark man of thirty-four or five, with a deep, resonant voice and positive gestures, had come to the sermon.

“Brethren,” said he, “in place of a sermon this morning, I shall read the annual exposition of our Christian faith” (exposition de la foi chretienne).  He began reading from a little book a historical account of the creation and the temptation, and so concise was the language and so certain his voice that I had the sensation of listening to a series of events that had actually taken place.  He might have been reading the communique.  “Le premier homme was called Adam, and la premiere femme, Eve.  Certain angels began a revolt against God; they are called the bad angels or the demons.” (Certains anges se sont mis en revolte contre Dieu; il sont appelles les mauvais anges ou les demons.) “And from this original sin arrives all the troubles, Death to which the human race is subjected.”  Such was the discourse I heard in the church by the trenches to the accompaniment of the distant chanting of The Wood.

Going by again late in the afternoon, I saw the end of an officer’s funeral.  The body, in a wooden box covered with the tricolor, was being carried out between two files of muddy soldiers, who stood at attention, bayonets fixed.  A peasant’s cart, a tumbril, was waiting to take the body to the cemetery; the driver was having a hard time con-trolling a foolish and restive horse.  The colonel, a fine-looking man in the sixties, came last from the church, and stood on the steps surrounded by his officers.  The dusk was falling.

“Officiers, sous-officiers, soldats.

“Lieutenant de Blanchet, whose death we deplore, was a gallant officer, a true comrade, and a loyal Frenchman.  In order that France might live, he was willing to close his eyes on her forever.”

The officer advanced to the tumbril and holding his hand high said:—­

“Farewell—­de Blanchet, we say unto thee the eternal adieu.”

The door of the church was wide open.  The sacristan put out the candles, and the smoke from them rose like incense into the air.  The tumbril rattled away in the dusk.  My mind returned again to the phrases of the sermon,—­original sin, death, life, of a sudden, seemed strangely grotesque.