Some of them, like the Australians and New-Zealanders, unfamiliar with
cathedrals, and not religious by instinct or training, wandered round
in a wondering way, with a touch of scorn, even of hostility, now and
then, for these mysteries--the chanting of the Office, the tinkling of
the bells at the high mass--which were beyond their understanding, and
which they could not link up with any logic of life, as they knew it
now, away up by Bapaume or Bullecourt, where God had nothing to do,
seemingly, with a night raid into Boche lines, when they blew a party
of Germans to bits by dropping Stoke bombs down their dugout, or with
the shrieks of German boys, mad with fear, when the Australians jumped
on them in the darkness and made haste with their killing. All the
same, this great church was wonderful, and the Australians, scrunching
their slouch-hats, stared up at the tall columns to the clerestory
arches, and peered through the screen to the golden sun upon the high-
altar, and touched old tombs with their muddy hands, reading the dates
on them--1250, 1155, 1415--with astonishment at their antiquity.
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