The next scene is a listening-post.  Two men are stretched on their stomachs in the brown grass.  A little hole, just enough to conceal their bodies, has been dug there.  The upturned roots of an old tree that a bursting shell had desecrated was just in front.  “Tap!  Tap!  Tap!” came the sounds of Boches at work somewhere near and underground.  It is needless to say that this was a Silhouette of Silence, and that a certain Y. M. C. A. secretary was glad when it was all over and he got back where he belonged.

[Illustration:  The upturned roots of an old tree were just in front.]

The beautiful columns of the Madeleine bask under the moonlight.  Paris was never so quiet.  The silence of eternity seemed to have settled down over her.  As one looked at the Madeleine under that magical white moonlight he imagined that he had been transported back to Athens, and that he was no longer living in modern times and in a world at war.  It was all so quiet and peaceful, with a great moon floating in the skies——­

But what is that awful wail that suddenly smites the stillness as with a blow?  It seems like the wailing of all the lost souls of the war.  It sounds like the crying of the more than five million sorrowing women there are left comfortless in Europe.  It is the siren.  An air-raid is on.  The “alert” is sounding.  The bombs begin to fall.  The Boches have gotten over even before the barrage is up.  Hell breaks loose for an hour.  No battle on the front ever heard more terrific cannonading than the next hour.  The barrage was the heaviest ever sent up over Paris.  The six Gothas that got over the city dropped twenty-four bombs.

The terrific bombardment, however, now as one looks back, only serves to make the preceding silence stand out more emphatically, and the Madeleine, basking in the moonlight the hour before, more beautiful in its silhouette of grace and bulk against the golden light.

A month on the front lines with thunder beating always, a month of machine-gun racket, a month of bombing by Gothas every night, a month of crunching wheels, a month of pounding motors and rumbling trucks, a month of marching men, a month of the pounding of horses’ hoofs on the hard roads of France, a month of sirens and clanging church-bells in the tocsin, and then a day in the valley of vision, down at Domremy where Jeanne d’Arc was born, was a contrast that gave a Silhouette of Silence to me.

One day on the Toul line, a train by night, and the next morning so far away that all you could hear was the singing of birds.  Peasants quietly tended their flocks.  Children played in the roads.  The valley was beautiful under the sunlight of as warm and as beautiful a spring day as ever fell over the fields of France.  I stood on the very spot where the peasant girl of Orleans caught her vision.  I looked down over the valley with “the green stream streaking through it,” with silence brooding over it, a bewildering contrast with the day and the month that had just preceded; and it all stands out as one of the Silhouettes of Silence.