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.