Bladesong: The Martyrs of Compiègne

So often one hears the question "What can we do?" More often than not, it remains a question without the effort of an answer. Yet in the turbulence and terror of the French Revolution, a time much like today, when the new sacrificed the old, when man insisted on replacing God, a community of Carmelites offered the oblation of their lives for peace, not without imagined horror, anxiety, and misgiving. The nuns were expelled from their convent and had to live in four separate houses and wear secular dress. In a strange coincidence, their clothes being washed at the time of their capture, they had nothing but their habits to wear. They witnessed as a community united--in the court where they were condemned, as they traveled in the carts toward death, and as they ascended, one by one, the steps to the guillotine and asked permission to die. Ten days after their deaths, the French Revolution ended. This is the story of an "unhushed" Blade, a story that repeats and demonstrates again through history how courage and sacrifice triumph.