CHAPTER IX

GOD'S HAND

Neither Gabrielle nor I spoke of these marvellous matters to anyone. It was of course connected with my sister's peculiar power of mediumistic control. The appearances were oddly varied, and we began to associate the return of the spirits with certain atmospheric conditions. Then there was a notable increase--if it could be so called--of these mysterious visitants after heavy engagements, when we might assume that the hosts of the disembodied had been greatly augmented. For weeks the conditions of the house were normal, and there would be no manifestations--manifestations which I myself began to appreciate and detect. The times most favorable for the discarnate effects were the still nights, and more generally after cold days than after hot ones. Dark nights were not necessarily preferred, as on a wonderfully splendid moonlight night, my sister saw the myriad shapes and lines of these, shall I call them GHOSTS? I remember feeling myself the thrill of some electric-like sensation penetrating my nerves, and half caught before my eyes the scintillations of tiny specks of light.

At first we were both not a little frightened. The tremendous impact of this mass of disembodied creatures broke down our mental equilibrium. We felt suddenly half immersed in the other world, and felt too the oncoming _denouement_ which, apprehended but unforeseen, awaited this spectral deluge. How often we sat at nights, deep into the night, at the front door under the leaf-embowered porch, fearful of entrance into the house, which had become a sort of _adytum_, which we might not penetrate, evicted as we were, by the unbidden tenants, that swarmed from grave, and trench, and field, hilltop and valley, from the crevices of walls, and the streets of villages, the cellars of churches, and the torn up holes of tree-roots. We might indeed have instituted--as at times I suggested--a sort of analysis of the psychical constants of these disembodied beings whose actuality neither of us doubted for an instant. We might have noted the exact moments of their larger recurrence, the intervals of their absence, the occasions when they became vocal, the peculiarities of their incidence upon ourselves in our physical sensations, or mental susceptibilities, or emotional response, if such observations were possible--that is if we could discover that the presence of these souls (?) affected us in those three elements of our existence at all.

Nothing of a systematic record was kept, but certain very sharp and certain hopelessly hazy impressions are quite, by me, easily recalled. The sharp impressions were in the nature of shocks allied with what might be less flatteringly called _frights_, and the hazy ones were indubitably aural influences such as have been determined as electrical, or epileptic, or hysteric. Naturally the latter possess the greater interest and have more to do with the extra-natural mystical agencies of spirits. Perhaps it would not be amiss to describe these--not too tediously--before I rehearse the last convincing stages of the spiritualistic manifestations as they ushered in the final descent of the "_Other World_" for the shame of human strife, and the obliterating arrest of this infernal, this demoralizing, this vast national embroilment of bitterness and hatred, that has unloosed the satanic energies of HELL to the confusion of _Faith_ and _Hope_ and _Charity_.

An experience of the first sort, followed immediately by the aural influence, took place about the beginning of June in 1916. It was a beautiful day, the light gloriously brilliant, and the summer fragrance of St. Choiseul filling our little world with its inexhaustible presence of roses, when, as I stood at my open window, leaning outward to regale my senses with the precious offerings of the earth and sky, I felt a wind, perhaps without any precise quality of heat or coolness, blow over me, although not a breath of the moving atmosphere outside stirred leaf or blade or flower, and then supervened a loss of consciousness, a relaxation of my body in sleep, and I, overcome with this unnatural drowsiness against which I forlornly struggled, sank into a chair, and did not recover consciousness before the evening. Now on that day was fought the battle of the ---- which killed 5000 men here in the west, while almost simultaneously the conflict in Poland added another 5000 to the number of the slain. There could be no doubt that my unconsciousness partook of the immediate character of syncope, or, to be even more scientific, that it was lethal, and might have terminated my life. That is my firm conviction. From a later experience I have become convinced that the ingestion so to speak into the air of the disembodied, actually devitalizes the atmosphere, and produces in those subjected to their multitudinous contact, asphyxiation. I awoke from my sleep wearied and apathetic.

The second occasion happened at night, and was not attributable to any sudden influx of the dead from contemporaneous battles. I have no theory to explain it. I was asleep in my bed. It was in the following August. I awoke with a start, almost as if I had been struck, and realized the most curious tingling inside my head, as if a thousand or more needles were therein busily engaged in employing their myriad points upon my sensitive tissues. It was an excruciating agony, not exactly acutely painful, but maddeningly intolerable and nerve racking and confusing. It was unendurable. Instinctively I clapped the bedclothes to my head and instantly there was complete relief. Exposing my head again to this outside atmospheric bombardment the agony recurred. I maintained my self-possession and actually tried the experiment over and over again of alternately putting my head outside of the bedclothes and then covering it with them. The effects were constant, and the inference unimpeachable that the air contained some agencies that exasperated my brain and pierced its envelope of skull, while the interposition of the loose textures of the bed-coverings stopped it. I can add authoritatively, that, as might have been expected, the thicker the covering of my head the more complete the relief, while upon no other part of my exposed body was any effect noticeable. The irritatable surfaces were confined to my head only. Not the spinal column nor the ganglionic centres along the thigh responded to this inexplicable force. There was no cessation of this attack throughout the night, but it slowly quieted down and disappeared as the day broke. The aural effects upon me were dual in character. They were physiological to the extent of producing a severe intermittent headache, and they were psychic or mental inasmuch as they provoked an irrepressible activity of thought, and, quite humiliatingly, with it, an extreme emotional irritability. So cross did I become that I left the house, and exhausted myself walking about the country to rid myself of this abominable disagreeableness.

Another experience distinctly connected with the frightful cost of the assaults upon the German trenches in September, 1915, took place in that month, a few days after the engagements--the suggestion might be hazarded that it requires some time for the "ghosts" to assemble themselves and repair to any agreed upon _rendez-vous_--when entering the house at evening, both my sister and myself became stifled with the strange suffocating effect of the air. It was irrespirable. I muttered "Again the spirits." The conclusion was ludicrous enough. We fell to our knees and crawled out of the room. In fact the circumstances resembled exactly the entrance of irrespirable gases into a room of pure air, and the consequent escape of the victims by creeping along the floor.

I must now state that these material effects were much more noticeable with me than with my sister. My sister, as the foregoing pages have reiterated was familiar with the spiritual world, and her powers of mediumistic control had been successfully evoked. She had indeed been visited apparently by numbers of the dead, and no unpleasant bodily sensations had been felt. The voices _alone_ had become to her unendurable, but for many months now these voices had been stilled, as it were; in fact ever since that moment when she saw the wraith of Sebastien Quintado above us in my room their intelligible articulations had not been heard--hearing meaning a kind of _inaudible utterance_ within the veil of the mind or soul. I do not think that I ever attained the sensitivity necessary to distinguish the voices, though, whether it was imagination or reality, my ears have possibly at moments rung with an indescribable confused murmur. And never, until the last _materialization_, did I discern faces. I except the special incarnation of Blanchette. These incidents, I have recalled, have only the slenderest value to establish any facts associated with the nature and functions of the disembodied, and they need not be further extended. Let me at once come to the ultimate act of this inexpressible drama.

My readers all know how, upon the approach of the spring of 1917, the Allies and their Teutonic adversaries prepared for the last desperate struggle, how it had become almost mutually understood that the fierce death-grapple should be undertaken outside of the trenches, and that the arbitrament of war, under skies darkened by all the most hideous emissions of shell, canister, powder, and infernal machines of poison, should be attempted in a colossal conflict, that strains the mind to conceive, and that might have approached in its horribleness of means and results, the very uttermost image of the _End of All Things_. The huge forces on both sides were assembled within the ten thousand miles of trenches, that had converted the northeastern edges of our country into a subterranean battlefield. From these trenches, almost so arranged by some supervising destiny, they were to arise, like implacable fiends or bloodless furies, and plunge their regiments, their brigades, their squadrons, their divisions, their armies against each other, in an unutterable tremendousness of slaughter, that might have rent the vault of Heaven, if any feeling, any sympathy, any recognition, any compassion, any power resided there! All of the resources were accumulated, and the last promised carnage proclaimed the extinction of civilized man in Europe.

Well that was the situation. On the eastern front the war had subsided. Russia was practically fought to a standstill, and though, with the customary Muscovite happiness of pretension, the Bear addressed his allies with pompous declarations, no one seriously thought of him. The Balkan turmoil had also simmered down to expectation simply. The invasion of Egypt and the upheaval of the Indian mutineers had not so very considerably materialized. Indeed everything now hung and was made to hang, upon this final, incalculable, terrible decision. Would either side survive its furious exterminating madness? Rumania was destroyed.

See what it meant. Two gigantic armies confronted each other over a line of two hundred and fifty miles, and the last resources of all the armaments of the magnified and reinforced invention of the great nations of Europe had been marshalled together to bring to some lasting decision the desecrating ravages of this racial duel. From the plain of Antwerp and the winding valleys of the Meuse, to the hilltops of the Marne, from Chalons to the slopes of the Vosges, the steel-bristling squadrons, carrying in their flanks volcanic fires, watched each other nervously, and yet, with a stolidity, born of custom and the grim confidence of an irreparable doom; with a detachment also from earthly ties, that made them seem like, almost like, discarnate beings. But to these men, brought there from the ends of Europe, to meet DEATH, as they might meet the morning or the evening of the common day, each country, throughout its fields and shires, its wards and towns, its bourgesses and departments and communes, its duchies, and electorates, would soon become an empty cenotaph.

Ah, but that was not all. There was a miracle in it. Yes, a miracle. God had moved the minds of the leaders towards this vast _denouement_. The huge military programme, replete with bristling glories of arms and men, the caparisoned squadrons of cavalry, the wide-mouthed, serried cannon, the lumpy groups of the squandering "Busy Berthas," and "Jack Johnsons," that wasted the ransom of kings in a few hours, the crowding millions of men covering square miles of desolated countrysides, the pitched tents, where the electric service, installed with thousands of wires, kept the tendrilous nets of communication quivering with orders, despatches, and rumors, the littered commissariats, filling screened refuges with barrels, wagons, soup-kitchens, and interminable bales of food, the long ranges of the hospital equipments, the stretchers, the Red-Cross orderlies, the waiting doctors in barracks and in tents, the auto-ambulances, the piled ramparts of bandages, and near at hand in loosely framed operating chambers the sweet sickly odors of ether and iodiform, and then back of all, along interminable alleys, the loaded ammunition vans, carrying the shells and canisters, the cartridges and gas engines and back again of these the grouped multitudes of spectators--all of this vast spectacle, repeated on the opposite line of the enemy--_vis-a-vis_--was thus concentrated, by a common impulse in both camps, for the irrevocable decision, _because GOD willed it_.

In such a grandiose style should the last act of HIS interposition be culminated, and the races of the earth should learn from the cavernous receptacles of spirit, from the shrined multitudes of the DEAD, enwrapped in the boundless fields of sky and star and cloud, issuing perchance from the wide-swung gates of Paradise, or Heaven, or of Hell itself--of the overwhelming pressure of the OTHER WORLD, learn thus too of the maintenance of sympathy between the affairs this side, and the affairs that side, of the narrow gap of DEATH! So it was.

But wonderful things had happened in the summer of 1916 and in its early autumn. There had been awful carnage at Verdun where the Teuton attempted to drive through to Paris and where the Gallic defiance rang out, _Ils ne passeron pas_. To and fro had the lines wavered, each interval strewn with innumerable corpses; the curtains of fire had swept to and fro and in their murderous folds life had expired as the flames destroy the swarming moths at harvest. Super-human deeds of valor had amazed the world that watched the struggle with terror-stricken eyes, and at last the Germans were pushed backward and the valleys of the Meuse, its hills and fields, its villages lay scorched, blackened, upheaved, overthrown, scarred from end to end, with most damnable desolation.

And northward the English had, along the Somme, struck at the Teuton with savage fury. The skies had been eclipsed with thunderous avalanches of fire, and for days the satanic deluge of shot and shell had stricken the German into helpless panic. Beyond Albert, with headlong rushes animated by God only knows what courage, the Briton had reached Thiepval Ginchy, Guillemont Clery and then shot forward with staggering, awful vehemence towards Bapaume and Peronne, and the defenses of the enemy, assailed on all sides, were melting away, and the invasion promised the greatest results. Except on the east the German forces seemed exhausted and the debacle had begun. The Allies were ready for the supreme effort.

Yes--there had been talk of PEACE--and, for one short moment, the world reeled almost in its dazed wonder-stricken joy. But the war-clouds closed again, and the steel-toothed, fire-shrouded fight stormed out again.

And then there had been another change. Their long line of armament had again been pushed further west by the Germans, who had forced our lines back, and again threatened the safety of Paris, had indeed so far trespassed over France, that their trenches and up-flung fortifications, their mounded parapets and encircling redoubts, broke in the line from Maubeuge, Rocroi, Dinant, Mézières, and Montmedy, eastward to Laon, again to Soissons, Compiègne, to Rheims, and now indeed, from the high ruined tower of the Chateau at La Ferté the trench line of the Teutons could be distinctly seen. The matter is important for _there_ Gabrielle summoned--summoned I say--the disembodied to the great intervention. _Ne riez pas; c'est vrai, le dernier mot de verité intime. Attendez! Vous savez bien la grande chose qui finit la guerre!_

All of this happened in the winter of 1917. And about the first of April of that spring--let me see--that was on a Sunday morning, Gabrielle came into my room--before our breakfast--and sat down at the window, that one looking west. She had been to early mass, her face was drawn and inspired, her eyes were large and frightened, and she was trembling with excitement.

I had been reading and scarcely noticed her entrance. The instant my eyes met hers I started with alarm.

"_Gabrielle qu'avez vous?_ What is it? The GHOSTS?"

She rose softly and came towards me. Then she knelt at my side, and looking rather down at her moving fingers than at me, told me this wonderful thing: One word--the spirits had not visited us for months, and we had, partly at least, forgotten them, in the busy work of the relief, and the frequent visits hither and thither, on errands of the Red-Cross mission. Gabrielle spoke rapidly in parts of her narrative, and then she hesitated, and seemed absent-minded, worn, and bewildered, but as she went on her words flowed abundantly and fastly,--so you remember it was before--and as she ended she had risen, and her expression assumed a peculiar vividness of--of--Ah how shall I say?--of seraphic beauty!

Yes, yes, it was just so. _Vraiment!_

"Alfred last night about two o'clock towards morning, I seemed to be awake, and I _saw_--Alfred I was not awake, it was a vision in my dreams--the figure of Sebastien Quintado like a blade of light standing at my bed-side, his eyes fixed into mine so that I was spell-bound--" Gabrielle here stopped, and her face blushed, I thought, with a kind of modest shame I could not comprehend--"Finally he spoke, and his voice sounded like an echo; I seemed just to hear it. Sometimes it grew louder, and then it faded and died away and I thought I leaned towards him to catch his words--so it seemed Alfred. He said this:

"'Gabrielle! Gabrielle! the spirits need you. The great war ends. The millions who have died, who now, as I do, repine in spirit-land, have gathered together, thousands upon thousands, upon thousands, and GOD sends them to stop the slaughter. God has dispensed council--the council of willfulness--to the nations and their generals, and in a little while they will assemble the vast armies on the west, and try out the conflict _in one great battle_. So it will be determined; So God wills it.

"'And then Gabrielle _WE_--the millions of the dead, those torn away from wives and children, from youth and love and joy, from friends and country, from all of the ambitions which animate our kind on earth; we will flock like clouds, when the north wind blows over St. Choiseul, and descend, visible, luminous, vocal, from the glowing skies, and from us, Gabrielle, will proceed a terrible Paralysis--Ay more--an undeniable dread and weakness.

"'It will, like a contagion, spread throughout the armies from rank to rank, from private to general, and back again; it will freeze the blood, it will dwindle the heart, it will thrill the brain. Before it bravery becomes a shrinking, ambition a regret, the thought of conflict a remorse. It will do more. It will slowly become a strange, unendurable, gnawing, piercing, scorching, internal pain, a pain so bitter and keen, that flesh will refuse its infliction, and so there will enter in that innumerable host just one thought--FLIGHT!

"'It will not be, though, the FLIGHT of cowards, but of Conscience-stricken men. And then a greater thing will come. There will be _no Flight_; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their voices, will wither their wills--one monstrous Stupor will overcome them, and for three days and a night, like the men overcome with sleep that watched the Apostle St. Peter in the prison, the armies of the Nations will sleep--Ay--and sleep in PAIN!

"'We shall abide above them. Our millions, by night and day, will perpetually afflict them. By day we will be unseen, by night we shall be seen. And from every particle of our incorporeal beings will flow the influence of our terror and our punishment. There will be no mitigation. GOD so wills it!

"'And when the three days are finished, then those men will awake--General and Prince and King and Private and Officer--and their strength will be as nothing, their vigor as a reed shaken by the wind, their wills as shaking vials of water, their threats like sheets whipped by the wind. So shall it be. Like men dazed in a flame, or smoke, or men caught half dead from the waters, will it be to them. It will be to them as the prophet Isaiah said:

"'"And they shall be brought down and shall speak out of the ground, and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their speech shall whisper out of the dust."

"'But'--it was at this point that Gabrielle rose, and stood like some Sybil or Prophetess, replenished with a divine ardor--'Gabrielle, you have been chosen as the instrument of our incarnation. I chose you. See! It is God's way! Great issues HE brings about through the lowly and the humble, the contrite and the simple. God chooses you. There must be the human, living, breathing, earth-born medium. Go to the Chateau of La Ferté on ---- and use your power. It will be added to. Let it be at night, the night before the great combat and the whole world will be advertised of it. That is the intention of God. So does He sway the feeble minds of men, turning their pride into humiliation, their certainties into failures, their promises into dreams. GO!

"'And Gabrielle, perchance it shall happen that then you also will be numbered with US--_those of the Over-World_.'"

Here Gabrielle stopped, a sudden flush mounted to her temples, and after came a deathly pallor, and then she fell upon my neck in an embrace utterly tearless, when I felt her body sway upon mine with deep pulsations, while her lips sought my own, and almost inaudibly she whispered in my ear--"Alfred, Sebastien kissed me as he vanished, and his lips were like fire, and the power he brought to me rested with me from his lips. I am ready to go. But you, Alfred, will go with me. It may be afterwards we shall be no more together."

Truly upon us unutterable things had fallen. We sat there together, almost unnoticing the passage of the day, immersed in a wonder that deepened into sadness as the anticipation of some wild unearthly ending of the great war steadily became more and more fixed in our minds, and with it--Ah there was the desperate cruelty and anguish of it--the possible separation of our lives. We hardly spoke, and only as the noon hour flooded the room with light and heat, did we arise, and, hand in hand, almost as if then we approached the tragic sacrifice of our happiness, went out, and down the stairway to our duties.

Perhaps dear old Emile Chouteau thinking of our propitiation would have said:

_Sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras._

* * * * *

During the long weeks before that awfully auspicious moment came, Gabrielle and I kept working at our tasks; she at the villages about us, in the homes of sick returning soldiers, and also at Paris on errands of every sort, and I in work of distribution, supervision and occasionally administration. But it was mostly at the hospital of Saint Jean that I experienced the full measure of an unusual depression--the customary, and now grown habitual, grievous seriousness of a national crisis, deepened into a pathos, almost unassuaged with any hope of joy. Here I saw our soldiers in that delicately conceived and apportioned religious retreat, itself a poetic dream of gentle loveliness, with its walls of time-stained stone, its avenues of trees, the ranged gardens of its sunny domains, with the petunias, the geraniums, the sages, and the high-browed and over shadowing chestnuts, the outspread firm outlines of tower and hall, its innumerable vistas, at evenings breathing a strange and subtle melancholy--_malheur à qui n'a pas senti ces mélancolies_ (Renan)--and the devoted community of priests and nurses. Here I saw the sons of my country dying, praying, chanting, smiling in their ferocious sufferings, slipping away into eternity with prayers for _La patrie_, or rising from the very border of the grave with mutilated bodies, and yet yearning for the last chance of fighting still again. Here I saw the deathless love of home, lingering in the sick bodies, whose lips moved in a delirium of dreams, that they were soon to revisit the old orchards, the vineyards, the chimney places, and their people--_Ah c'était miserable_--and I have seen the chapel filled with the mourners and the broken-limbed companions of the dead, lifting the coffin so gently, as if the lifeless figure in it might feel their friendliness and thank them for it. Yes more too--a spectacle that might have touched the heart of Heaven--the wounded in the wards singing, in murmurs, between their gasps of pain, or just slowly gesturing, as it were, with body and fingers and with their speaking eyes in unison, _La Marseillaise_. You know how M. ---- has described it. _Ecoutez._

"_Nos blessés chantaient ainsi par la bouche de leur blessures et nous en écoutant les strophes sublimes, il nous semblait les comprendre pour la première fois!_"

Our--Gabrielle's and mine--miraculous mission was never forgotten. We did not speak of it, but we watched the racing days, and as we watched the words of the VISION grew visibly true. The Great Effort was to be made; that we knew. In the face of all prudence, driven onward by the irresistible purpose of the Almighty, the generals of the armies announced the dread decision of "_trying it out_"--the English said--in one colossal combat. It was the edict of fate that rushed them on to this conclusion. And it was trumpeted to the whole world. And no one thought it strange. No one wondered. And yet in any finite human view what unutterable folly! Ah--it was God's way. HE had blinded the eyes of the wise. HE had perverted the judgment of the mighty. HE had turned the councils of the Great into childishness. His hand indeed again rested on the earth, and its peoples, and the vast _END_ would be--so it became clear to my sister and to me--HIS Revelation of Himself, blasting clean into the hearts of men this truth, that HE LIVED.

So the armies of the Allies and of the Powers gathered together against each other, along the line of the eastern frontiers of France, as I have said. There the last gage of war was to be flung down, and the issue tested.

But no new command came to us from the spirit-world. It was now within two weeks of the hour set for the DESCENT, and Gabrielle and I wondered that we should not hear again of the mysterious matter. Need we doubt? See how the current of events foretold the END! That last night at the old home in St. Choiseul I shall never forget. We sat together in the big library throughout the night expecting some sudden GUIDANCE from the Unknown. We said very little. The weight of our purpose had withdrawn us from the companionship of our neighbors, and for weeks we had lived alone in a reserve of solitude, of wondering suspense, that also tied our tongues. We had become stupefied with the terror of this admission to the supernatural, as if we were holding the hands of the Creator! Did we believe? Gabrielle did, and--I will confess it--I linked it all with the phantasmagoria of events of the hideous war, as something possible--just possible.

That was the end of September. We must be at the Chateau of La Ferté the following night if punctuality counted in this tremendous eventuality. And of course it did count. How exactly GOD had given his commands to Moses and Joshua, to Barak and to Gideon, to Jephthah, to David, to Solomon, to Elijah! So instinctively we grouped ourselves with the designs of Providence as indeed commissioned agents of its ends.

It was almost morning; the eastern sky reddening with flakes of fire scattered over it, and the light entering the room from the south wall of the garden, where the clustering vines hung untouched and forgotten; when Gabrielle spoke to me.

"Alfred have you any doubts? The time is short for our preparation. Tonight we should be at La Ferté."

"I will go with you Gabrielle. Would you go alone?"

And my sister answered in the words of Barak to Deborah:

"'If thou will go with me then I will go; but if thou will not go with me, then I will not go.'"

"Gabrielle all issues are with God. I will go with you."

Later, when the day had fully broken, and the sunlight flooded everything without and within the house, and, from its singular clarity, the not usual picture of the Eiffel Tower, far off in Zeppelin-haunted Paris, was just descried as a hazy skein of lines in the sky--we were both looking at it--the front door was assailed with a furious knocking. I ran to it and opening it encountered Privat Deschat with a paper in his hands, his face convulsed with emotion, his mouth wide open, and crowded with insulting epithets, that he flung upon me with such emphasis that, for an instant, I thought I was the occasion of his rage. But it was not so. It was what he read that had startled him into this unaccustomed excitement and denunciation.

"_Voila_," he shouted, waving the sheet he held in my face. "_Voila, une clique des fous. Les scelerats; les imbecilles abominables; traitres_; Dogs of Perdition. See, they intend to risk all on a single cast of the die and then--_C'est assez à faire un homme honnête_--with his head on his shoulders--_créver avec desespoir_, with madness. Alfred Lupin, what do you suppose? The Allies and the Boches and their forces have agreed upon tomorrow as a day of final quittance. There is to be one huge battle, _un conflit superbe_ and then--_Quoi?_ Give up--_la FIN. C'est a dire une massacre insupportable_, unheard of, monstrous, irreparable, and then--_Ah, le Diable pourquoi existe je?--la renvoi à jour fixe._ Can you believe such a suicide of the nation, such a shameless cowardice, such insanity, such depravity of ideas? And they make of it a circus, _une parade macaronique_, and of the nation _un jouet_. Is it not most damnable? Eh?"

Stunned by this unexpected outburst I retreated a step, and following me with the offending paper he continued his onslaught.

"Have you not heard? The Generals, the Kings, the Princes, the Diplomats, the Soldiers, have all agreed upon one infernal exterminating duel, and with that over no matter who wins, they throw down their arms and make peace. And here--HERE--" he shouted, still pursuing me backward into the hall-way, while behind me gathered Hortense, Julie, and even Gabrielle in appalled curiosity--"here they proclaim it to their peoples, and bid them gather at the carnage, _Une spectacle magnifique assurement_--the death of the nations. What poison of insanity, of miserable, hopeless, brutal, depraved idiocy, possesses our men? Has the whole world become a drivelling fool, _une bête écervelé_?"

He was still holding out towards me the paper, and in despair over his exasperation, I seized it, and rushed with it to the light, while Privat Deschat rushed with me, and the little circle of auditors closed about us in amazement. I saw at once the cause of Deschat's disgust. The sheet he had brought to us was a broadside--_une bordée_--which evidently was intended for circulation throughout the country, and had been posted over the walls of the cities, where what I knew, was frankly announced--the _umpirage_, the _arbitrament_ in one last conflict of the undecided war. It read.

PROCLAMATION

PEACE COMES WITH VICTORY. ONE BATTLE MORE. THEN IT IS ALL OVER. ON ---- THE BATTLE BEGINS. THAT ENDS THE WAR. LET THE NATIONS GATHER. THE TOURNAMENT OF CIVILIZATION IS AT HAND. SUCH IS THE DECISION OF THE RULERS, AFTER THAT INDUSTRY, REST. PRAY FOR US, AND COME AND SEE.

L'ADMINISTRATION.

"Yes," mocked Deschat, "_l'es boutiquiers_ are selling seats for it now in Paris, in Berlin, in London. _Mon Dieu je vais à me mettre au cercueil._" With that admonishment he vanished from the house.

I turned to Gabrielle.

"Gabrielle, it is enough. It is the writing on the wall. GOD COMES. He has truly turned the heads of the nations. It is again the words of the prophet Jeremiah:

"'Yes, the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow, observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord.'

"We need no further assurance, Gabrielle. It will be as the spirit of Sebastien Quintado said. LET US GO AT ONCE."