Esther
The new church of St. John's, on Fifth Avenue, was thronged the morning of the last Sunday of October, in the year 1880. Sitting in the gallery, beneath the unfinished frescoes, and looking down the nave, one caught an effect of autumn gardens, a suggestion of chrysanthemums and geraniums, or of October woods, dashed with scarlet oaks and yellow maples. As a display of austerity the show was a failure, but if cheerful content and innocent adornment please the Author of the lilies and roses, there was reason to hope that this first service at St. John's found favor in his sight, even though it showed no victory over the world or the flesh in this part of the United States. The sun came in through the figure of St. John in his crimson and green garments of glass, and scattered more color where colors already rivaled the flowers of a prize show; while huge prophets and evangelists in flowing robes looked down from the red walls on a display of human vanities that would have called out a vehement Lamentation of Jeremiah or Song of Solomon, had these poets been present in flesh as they were in figure. Solomon was a brilliant but not an accurate observer; he looked at the world from the narrow stand-point of his own temple. Here in New York he could not have truthfully said that all was vanity, for even a more ill-natured satirist than he must have confessed that there was in this
Just then our attention was attracted in quite another direction: La
Boiselle.
It had been fairly obvious for some time that La Boiselle was about to
be attacked. While the rest of the landscape before us was only treated
to an occasional shell-burst, heavy explosions had been taking place in
this clump of ruins. Huge roan-coloured bouquets of brickdust and ashes
leaped from time to time into the air and slowly dissolved into a tawny
mist which floated slowly beyond the scarred edge of the hill. It must
have been a big howitzer shell, or perhaps a very large trench mortar
bomb, which was making them. Gradually most of our artillery in the
background to the left of us seemed to be converging upon this village.
Suddenly, at a little before 4 p.m., there lashed on to the place the
shrapnel from three or four batteries of British field guns. They seemed
to be fired as fast as they could be served. Shell after shell laid whip
strokes across the dry earth as swiftly as a man could ply a lash. One
knew perfectly well that our infantry must now be advancing for the
attack, and that this hailstorm was to make the garrison, if any were
left, keep its heads down. But the shoulder of the hill prevented us
from seeing where the infantry was going to issue.
In the turmoil which covered that corner we scarcely noticed that the
nature of the shelling had suddenly changed. Our shell-bursts had gone
much farther up the hill--one realised that; and heavy black clouds were
spurting into the air below Boiselle, just behind the hill's shoulder.
The _crash, crash, crash, crash_ of four heavy shells, one following
The new church of St. John's, on Fifth Avenue, was thronged the morning of the last Sunday of October, in the year 1880. Sitting in the gallery, beneath the unfinished frescoes, and looking down the nave, one caught an effect of autumn gardens, a suggestion of chrysanthemums and geraniums, or of October woods, dashed with scarlet oaks and yellow maples. As a display of austerity the show was a failure, but if cheerful content and innocent adornment please the Author of the lilies and roses, there was reason to hope that this first service at St. John's found favor in his sight, even though it showed no victory over the world or the flesh in this part of the United States. The sun came in through the figure of St. John in his crimson and green garments of glass, and scattered more color where colors already rivaled the flowers of a prize show; while huge prophets and evangelists in flowing robes looked down from the red walls on a display of human vanities that would have called out a vehement Lamentation of Jeremiah or Song of Solomon, had these poets been present in flesh as they were in figure. Solomon was a brilliant but not an accurate observer; he looked at the world from the narrow stand-point of his own temple. Here in New York he could not have truthfully said that all was vanity, for even a more ill-natured satirist than he must have confessed that there was in this