There was another man who illustrated in a finer way that saying, “It is your eyes which prevent you from seeing.”  This man before the war was a village-priest, and no credit to his calling.  He had a sister who had spent her youth for him and worshipped him beyond everything in the world.  He took her adoration brutally for granted.  At the outbreak of hostilities he joined the army, serving bravely in the ranks till he was hopelessly blinded.  Having always been a thoroughly selfish man, his privation drove him nearly to madness.  He had always used the world; now for the first time he had been used by it.  His viciousness broke out in blasphemy; he hated both God and man.  He made no distinction between people in the mass and the people who tried to help him.  His whole desire was to inflict as much pain as he himself suffered.  When his sister came to visit him, he employed every ingenuity of word and gesture to cause her agony.  Do what she would, he refused to allow her love either to reach or comfort him.  She was only a simple peasant woman.  In her grief and loneliness she thought matters out and arrived at what seemed to her a practical solution.  On her next visit to the hospital she asked to see the doctor.  She was taken to him and made her request.  “I love my brother,” she said; “I have always given him everything.  He has lost his eyes and he cannot endure it.  Because I love him, I could bear it better.  I have been thinking, and I am sure it is possible:  I want you to remove my eyes and to put them into his empty sockets.”

When the priest was told of her offer, he laughed derisively at her for a fool.  Then the reason she had given for her intended sacrifice was told to him, “Because I love him, I could bear it better.”  He fell silent.  All that day he refused food; in the eternal darkness, muffled by his bandages, he was arriving at the truth:  she had been willing to suffer what he was now suffering, because she loved him.  The hand of love would have made the burden bearable and, if for her, why not for himself?  At last, after years of refusal, the simplicity of her tenderness reached and touched him.  Presently he was discharged from hospital and taken in hand by the teachers of the blind, who taught him to play the organ.  One day his sister came and led him back to his village-parish.  Before the war, by his example, he was a danger to God and man; now he sets a very human example of sainthood, labouring without ceasing for others more fortunate than himself.  He has increased his efficiency for service by his blindness.  Of him it is absolutely true that it was his eyes that prevented him from seeing—­from seeing the splendour that lay hidden in himself, no less than in his fellow creatures.

So far I have sketched in the main what the war of compassion is doing for the repatries—­the captured French civilians sent back from Germany—­and for the refugees of the devastated areas, who have either returned to their ruined farms and villages or were abandoned as useless when the Hun retired.  To complete the picture it remains to describe what is being done for the civilian population which has always lived in the battle area of the French armies.