The wounded watched them drawing slowly nearer, until they came, fighting off death, clinging to life as shipwrecked sailors cling to a raft and watch the boats pulling toward them.
A young German officer, his smart cavalry cloak torn and slashed, and filthy with dried mud and blood and with his eyes in bandages, groped toward a pail of water, feeling his way with his foot, his arms outstretched, clutching the air.

To guide him a priest took his arm, and the officer turned and stumbled against him.

Thinking the priest was one of his own men, he swore at him, and then, to learn if he wore shoulder-straps, ran his fingers over the priest's shoulders, and, finding a silk cassock, said quickly in French: "Pardon me, my father; I am blind." As the young cure guided me through the wrecked cathedral his indignation and his fear of being unjust waged a fine battle.

"Every summer," he said, "thousands of your fellow countrymen visit the cathedral.

They come again and again.