and their first lines, between their extreme edges, between the fringes of the two huge armies that are up against each other, looking at each other and not seeing, and waiting—­it’s not very far; sometimes forty yards, sometimes sixty.  To me it looked about a stride, at the great height where I was planing.  And behold I could make out two crowds, one among the Boches, and one of ours, in these parallel lines that seemed to touch each other; each was a solid, lively lump, and all around ’em were dots like grains of black sand scattered on gray sand, and these hardly budged—­it didn’t look like an alarm!  So I went down several turns to investigate.

“Then I understood.  It was Sunday, and there were two religious services being held under my eyes—­the altar, the padre, and all the crowd of chaps.  The more I went down the more I could see that the two things were alike—­so exactly alike that it looked silly.  One of the services—­whichever you like—­was a reflection of the other, and I wondered if I was seeing double.  I went down lower; they didn’t fire at me.  Why?  I don’t know at all.  Then I could hear.  I heard one murmur. one only.  I could only gather a single prayer that came up to me en bloc, the sound of a single chant that passed by me on its way to heaven.  I went to and fro in space to listen to this faint mixture of hymns that blended together just the same although they were one against the other; and the more they tried to get on top of each other, the more they were blended together up in the heights of the sky where I was floating.

“I got some shrapnel just at the moment when, very low down, I made out the two voices from the earth that made up the one—­’Gott mit uns!’ and ’God is with us!’—­and I flew away.”

The young man shook his bandage-covered head; he seemed deranged by the recollection.  “I said to myself at the moment, ‘I must be mad!’”

“It’s the truth of things that’s mad,” said the zouave.

With his eyes shining in delirium, the narrator sought to express and convey the deep disturbing idea that was besieging him, that he was struggling against.

“Now think of it!” he said.  “Fancy those two identical crowds yelling things that are identical and yet opposite, these identical enemy cries!  What must the good God think about it all?  I know well enough that He knows everything, but even if He knows everything, He won’t know what to make of it.”

“Rot!” cried the zouave.

“He doesn’t care a damn for us, don’t fret yourself.”

“Anyway, what is there funny about it?  That doesn’t prevent people from quarreling with each other—­and don’t they!  And rifle-shots speak jolly well the same language, don’t they?”

“Yes,” said the aviator, “but there’s only one God.  It isn’t the departure of prayers that I don’t understand; it’s their arrival.”

The conversation dropped.

“There’s a crowd of wounded laid out in there,” the man with the dull eyes said to me, “and I’m wondering all ways how they got ’em down here.  It must have been a terrible job, tumbling them in here.”