"What's written there? What's there? Who's there?" he called. He called and continued to call; then another terror, the terror of the sound of his own voice seized him; he did not dare to call again; he whispered. There was something written on the coffin that his mind reeled to entertain. Without quite knowing how he came to be there, O'Hagan found himself bending over the coffin. He read the lettering, and it was:
_Hilaire O'Hagan ob. 1696 aetat 35. Parva domus, magna quies._
He sank down on his knees with a childish sob. Sometimes the old church seemed absolutely still, and the only sound to be heard was the sighing of the night breeze below him in the pines, but sometimes the place seemed full of muffled movements, and once O'Hagan could have sworn that the large carved handle of the door turned. Even as he stood there he heard steps just outside, and with a sudden horror, he saw the heavy door slowly open. A priest stood in the open doorway with an inscrutable smile on his lips--the same clean-shaven man with a long aquiline nose and singularly square chin, that he had seen before in his dreams.
"Brother," he said, in a moved voice. "You must go back and help your comrades. There is no peace for you yet. Yes, brother, I know it is written that we shall rest from our labours--but the beginning of our rest is not yet. _We_ must go and help them in the firing line yonder----"
"No, no, holy man!" O'Hagan pleaded. "I have had enough.... There is hell over there."
"They are calling us, don't you hear them--the living and the dead----"
O'Hagan could see those great green flashes that burst in the sky so near to him. He could almost hear the angry zipping of high explosive shrapnel close over his head. God! how he hated it all!
"How hard it is, Father, to make these children understand!" came softly from the priest's lips.
O'Hagan's regiment had retired to their trenches in good order. They were some of those trenches round about Ypres, and all the world has read how the Germans battered and delivered terrific infantry attacks on this part of our line without cessation. A certain morning, about six o'clock, the Huns decided to deliver a sharp attack, and there was "considerable artillery activity" on the part of the German guns. Such activity was spoken of in the trenches as "raising the lid off Hell." There was a lull after about an hour's rain of every kind of missile that man has invented to batter his brother with. Then the Huns came on in earnest. Some reached the trenches only to be met with a murderous fire: they fell in little huddled heaps in the blood and the mud and the slime of the trenches. But the whole German race seemed to be flowing in on the British, and they fairly got into the trenches, though they were twice driven out. Yard by yard the battalion retired. The next moment an unearthly, fluorescent light shot and flooded along the trenches. The troops gasped for a moment, and then started back. Standing on a traverse in full view of Germans and Englishmen was a tall man with yellow hair, in a priest's cassock. He was brandishing a sword that flashed like a tongue of flame, and crying "Turn back! turn back! advance!"