long reviled and insulted my Saviour — I bless God
when I think that our brave French detachment is
fighting shoulder to shoulder with the English.
Before Gaza the Turkish trenches have been captured.
Jaffa has fallen, by the grace of our Lord. He is
leading us on to Jerusalem: "Follow Me!" He com-
mands, as He shows us the way through devastation
and death to life, "Follow Me, die for Me! Yes, if
needs be die that you may be one with My resurrec-
tion".5 Thus did Antoine Martel, Cure of Saint Loup,
strive to ease his anguish of heart by much speaking.
But now Jan was growing hourly more restless. He
could no longer study, nor eat, nor sleep, as the
galling frustrations imposed on his flesh began to
find for themselves a new channel. In great bitterness
of spirit he passed his days, but his sleepless nights
were even more bitter; filled with longings, and with
hatreds no less intense, so that when he knelt clasping
his crucifix in agonized prayer, it would seem like a
weapon.
€Cleanse me even as by fire,' he would pray, the
while he conjured up visions of war and the flames
and the blood and the lusts of war, lest he turn to
his lusting for ^Eliana.
Such nights were leaving their mark upon Jan,
his face had grown thin to emaciation. A kind of
keen misery burnt in his eyes and shook in his words
of fierce condemnation — he could now seldom speak
except to condemn, and hearing him Christophe
would think of the shadow.
Every evening the cousins would spend together,
for Jan sought to escape from his mother and the
Cure: 'Does he want me to skulk like a coward?5 he
would rage. CA fine thing in view of those sermons of
his! "Go," he says to the others, but to me he says:
"Stay until you must go.55 I think he is mad —or
is it from cruelty that he keeps me?5
430