The children kicked their little legs, wriggled about the seats, and gaped at the arched roof while their mothers were on their knees praying their own prayers, and here and there crying.  The gray clouds of rain outside gathered, I suppose, more and more; for the deep church continuously darkened.  The lads in front began to sing a military hymn in odd, rather strained voices; I could not disentangle the words, but only one perpetual refrain; so that it sounded like

Sacrarterumbrrar pour la patrie,
Valdarkararump pour la patrie.

Then this ceased; and silence continued, the coloured windows growing gloomier and gloomier with the clouds.  In the dead stillness a child started crying suddenly and incoherently.  In a city far to the north a French diplomatist and a German aristocrat were talking.

I will not make any commentary on the thing that could blur the outline of its almost cruel actuality.  I will not talk nor allow any one else to talk about “clericalism” and “militarism.”  Those who talk like that are made of the same mud as those who call all the angers of the unfortunate “Socialism.”  The women who were calling in the gloom around me on God and the Mother of God were not “clericalists “; or, if they were, they had forgotten it.  And I will bet my boots the young men were not “militarists”—­quite the other way just then.  The priest made a short speech; he did not utter any priestly dogmas (whatever they are), he uttered platitudes.  In such circumstances platitudes are the only possible things to say; because they are true.  He began by saying that he supposed a large number of them would be uncommonly glad not to go.  They seemed to assent to this particular priestly dogma with even more than their alleged superstitious credulity.  He said that war was hateful, and that we all hated it; but that “in all things reasonable” the law of one’s own commonwealth was the voice of God.  He spoke about Joan of Arc; and how she had managed to be a bold and successful soldier while still preserving her virtue and practising her religion; then he gave them each a little paper book.  To which they replied (after a brief interval for reflection): 

Pongprongperesklang pour la patrie,
Tambraugtararronc pour la patrie.

which I feel sure was the best and most pointed reply.

While all this was happening feelings quite indescribable crowded about my own darkening brain, as the clouds crowded above the darkening church.  They were so entirely of the elements and the passions that I cannot utter them in an idea, but only in an image.  It seemed to me that we were barricaded in this church, but we could not tell what was happening outside the church.  The monstrous and terrible jewels of the windows darkened or glistened under moving shadow or light, but the nature of that light and the shapes of those shadows we did not know and hardly dared to guess.  The dream began, I think, with a dim fancy