“O how I hate war—­hate it—­hate it!  And this war of all wars, I hate it worst.  It is so ruthless, so inexorably cruel; so utterly meaningless, viewed at close range.  Yesterday they brought me into Northern France, and I spent the twilight last night looking over the ruins of the local church.  It is the most important small church in Northern France and contains one of the earliest ribbed vaults in France, they say.  It was built about 1100, and now the thing is smashed.  It is what our artillerymen call a one-shot church.  O the waste of it—­churches, men, homes, creeds!  How many one-shot creeds have perished in this hell-fire!  Still out of the old I suppose the new will come.  But I have talked to women, to peasant women in their homes, to noble women in hospitals; to women in their shops and women on the farms, and I know that if the new world brings them as its heritage, only the enlarged comradeship they are taking with men in this time of suffering, then one thing is sure:  We women will strike an awful blow at future wars!  The womanhood of the past, someway, is like these sad, broken churches of France.  It is shattered and gone, and in its ruins we see its exquisite beauty, its ineffable grace, its symbolism of a faith that once sufficed.  But it will not be restored.  We shall build new temples; we shall know new women.  The old had to go, that the new might come.  And our new women and our new temples shall be dedicated, not merely to faith, not merely to beauty, not merely to adoration but to service, to service and comradeship in the world.”

As he finished reading the letter Henry’s eyes glistened.  Its emotion had awakened the crusader, who said gently:  “Well, Bill, I presume it is the potential mother in every woman that makes her worth while.  And if this war will only harness motherhood to the public conscience, the net gain will be worth the war, however it is settled.”

CHAPTER VIII

In which we discover “A new heaven and A new earth”

Finally our talk left the war and its meaning, and we fell to wondering how the Young Doctor’s hand was coming on, and we thought of the Eager Soul, too, standing so wistfully between love and death and the picture of the Young Doctor sitting in the garden among the flowers of early autumn, more poet than soldier or doctor, came to both of us as we talked and then Henry stooped to the floor and picked up two folded sheets of paper.  Clearly they had dropped from the envelope sent to us by the Eager Soul.  He opened one and remarked: