They came out of a side-door into Heaven’s full light. A phalanx of Shining Ones swung across a great square singing:
“To Him Who made the Heavens abide, yet cease not from their motion,
To Him Who drives the cleansing tide twice a day round ocean—
Let His Name be magnified in all poor folk’s devotion!”
Death halted their leader, and asked a question.
“We’re Volunteer Aid Serving Powers,” the Seraph explained, “reporting for duty in the Domestic Induced Casualty Department—told off to help relatives, where we can.”
The shift trooped on—such an array of Powers, Honours, Glories, Toils, Patiences, Services, Faiths and Loves as no man may conceive even by favour of dreams. Death and St. Peter followed them into a D.I.C.D. Shed on the English side, where, for the moment, work had slackened. Suddenly a name flashed on the telephone-indicator. “Mrs. Arthur Bedott, 317, Portsmouth Avenue, Brondesbury. Husband badly wounded. One child.” Her special weakness was appended.
A Seraph on the raised dais that overlooked the Volunteer Aids waiting at the entrance, nodded and crooked a finger. One of the new shift—a temporary Acting Glory—hurled himself from his place and vanished earthward.
“You may take it,” Death whispered to St. Peter, “there will be a sustaining epic built up round Private Bedott’s wound for his wife and Baby Bedott to cling to. And here—” they heard wings that flapped wearily—“here, I suspect, comes one of our failures.”
A Seraph entered and dropped, panting, on a form. His plumage was ragged, his sword splintered to the hilt; and his face still worked with the passions of the world he had left, as his soiled vesture reeked of alcohol.