Because there could be no mistake now. The face, so mournful, so benign, so pitying, bore on the forehead a crown of thorns! Even while the blood coursed in Dalroy's veins with the awe of it, he knew that he was looking at the figure of Christ on the Cross. This, then, was the calvary spoken of by Joos, and invisible in the earlier murk. The beams of the risen moon etched the painted carving in most realistic lights and shadows. The pallid skin glistened as though in agony. The big, piercing eyes gazed down at the passing soldiers as the Man of Sorrows might have looked at the heedless legionaries of Rome.
The travelled Briton, to whom the wayside calvary is a familiar object in many a continental landscape, can seldom pass the twisted, tortured figure on the Cross without a feeling of awe, tempered by insular non-comprehension of the religious motive which thrusts into prominence the most solemn emblem of Christianity in unexpected and often incongruous places. Seen as Dalroy saw it, a hunted fugitive crouching in a ditch, while the Huns who would again destroy Europe were lurching past in thousands within a few feet of where he lay, the image of Christ crucified had a new and overwhelming significance. It induced a vague uneasiness of spirit, almost a doubt. That very day he had killed four men and gravely wounded a fifth, and there was no shred of compunction in his soul. Yet, in body and mind, he was worthy of his class, and this gray old world has failed to evolve any finer human type than that which is summed up in the phrase, an officer and a gentleman. For the foulest of crimes, either committed or contemplated, he had been forced to use both the scales and the sword of justice; but there was something wholly disturbing and abhorrent in the knowledge that two thousand years after the Great Atonement men professedly Christian should so wantonly disregard every principle that Christ taught and practised and died for. He reflected bitterly that the German soldier, whether officer or private, is enjoined to keep a diary. What sort of record would "Heinrich," or Busch, or the three Westphalian lieutenants have left of that day's doings if they had lived and told the truth?