Yes, yes, it was just so. Vraiment!
"Alfred last night about two o'clock towards morning, I seemed to be awake, and I saw—Alfred I was not awake, it was a vision in my dreams—the figure of Sebastien Quintado like a blade of light standing at my bed-side, his eyes fixed into mine so that I was spell-bound—" Gabrielle here stopped, and her face blushed, I thought, with a kind of modest shame I could not comprehend—"Finally he spoke, and his voice sounded like an echo; I seemed just to hear it. Sometimes it grew louder, and then it faded and died away and I thought I leaned towards him to catch his words—so it seemed Alfred. He said this:
"'Gabrielle! Gabrielle! the spirits need you. The great war ends. The millions who have died, who now, as I do, repine in spirit-land, have gathered together, thousands upon thousands, upon thousands, and GOD sends them to stop the slaughter. God has dispensed council—the council of willfulness—to the nations and their generals, and in a little while they will assemble the vast armies on the west, and try out the conflict in one great battle. So it will be determined; So God wills it.
"'And then Gabrielle WE—the millions of the dead, those torn away from wives and children, from youth and love and joy, from friends and country, from all of the ambitions which animate our kind on earth; we will flock like clouds, when the north wind blows over St. Choiseul, and descend, visible, luminous, vocal, from the glowing skies, and from us, Gabrielle, will proceed a terrible Paralysis—Ay more—an undeniable dread and weakness.
"'It will, like a contagion, spread throughout the armies from rank to rank, from private to general, and back again; it will freeze the blood, it will dwindle the heart, it will thrill the brain. Before it bravery becomes a shrinking, ambition a regret, the thought of conflict a remorse. It will do more. It will slowly become a strange, unendurable, gnawing, piercing, scorching, internal pain, a pain so bitter and keen, that flesh will refuse its infliction, and so there will enter in that innumerable host just one thought—FLIGHT!
"'It will not be, though, the FLIGHT of cowards, but of Conscience-stricken men. And then a greater thing will come. There will be no Flight; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their voices, will wither their wills—one monstrous Stupor will overcome them, and for three days and a night, like the men overcome with sleep that watched the Apostle St. Peter in the prison, the armies of the Nations will sleep—Ay—and sleep in PAIN!
"'We shall abide above them. Our millions, by night and day, will perpetually afflict them. By day we will be unseen, by night we shall be seen. And from every particle of our incorporeal beings will flow the influence of our terror and our punishment. There will be no mitigation. GOD so wills it!
"'And when the three days are finished, then those men will awake—General and Prince and King and Private and Officer—and their strength will be as nothing, their vigor as a reed shaken by the wind, their wills as shaking vials of water, their threats like sheets whipped by the wind. So shall it be. Like men dazed in a flame, or smoke, or men caught half dead from the waters, will it be to them. It will be to them as the prophet Isaiah said:
"'"And they shall be brought down and shall speak out of the ground, and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their speech shall whisper out of the dust."
"'But'—it was at this point that Gabrielle rose, and stood like some Sybil or Prophetess, replenished with a divine ardor—'Gabrielle, you have been chosen as the instrument of our incarnation. I chose you. See! It is God's way! Great issues HE brings about through the lowly and the humble, the contrite and the simple. God chooses you. There must be the human, living, breathing, earth-born medium. Go to the Chateau of La Ferté on —— and use your power. It will be added to. Let it be at night, the night before the great combat and the whole world will be advertised of it. That is the intention of God. So does He sway the feeble minds of men, turning their pride into humiliation, their certainties into failures, their promises into dreams. GO!