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thousands of lives without gaining an inch of ground. And men were learning to take to the air, carrying the carnage with them. At first pilots shot at one another with pistols and rifles, but later machine guns were brought into play. Spiritualism flourished as the relatives of the dead and the lost sought communication with their sons and husbands. Thousands of women woke up screaming in the middle of the night, always at the precise time that their men fell on the distant battlefields. This same phenomenon had shored up faith in spiritualism during the Civil War, and it was to be repeated during World War II and the Korean War. It happens still as our young men hurtle headlong into pools of their own blood in Vietnam. On April 6, 1917, the United States formally entered the Great War. One month later, on May 13, a Sunday, Lucia Abobora, ten, Francisco Marto, nine, and Jacinto Marto, seven, were in the meadows of a place called Cova da Iria outside of Fatima, Portugal, when they saw a flash of light in the clear sky. Thinking that it was lightning, they ran for shelter under an oak tree, and when they reached it, they stopped in amazement, for there, hovering just above a 3-foot-high evergreen nearby, a brilliant globe of light hung suspended. Within this globe there was an entity garbed in a luminous white robe with a face of light that ‘“‘dazzled and hurt the eyes.” “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you,” the entity said gently in a low, musical voice. The awed children asked her (it was a feminine voice) we aee -- “Tam from heaven,”’ she reportedly replied. “I come to ask you to come here for six months in succession, on the thirteenth day at this same hour. Then I will tell you who I am, and what I want. And afterward I will return here a seventh time.” She asked them to say the Rosary every day and to pray for peace. Then the globe silently rose and floated away. It is noteworthy that only Lucia and Jacinto claimed to hear the voice. Francisco saw the object but heard nothing. The excited trio rushed home and tried to tell their families about their vision, but the adults refused to take them seriously. Word spread, however, and on June 13, a small crowd of devout pilgrims followed the children to the Cova da Iria and watched from a distance. One of the witnesses, a woman named Maria Carreira, testified that she saw nothing when the children suddenly knelt and began talking to an unseen entity, but she did hear a peculiar sound—like the buzzing of a bee. Lucia later said that the Lady asked them to learn to read. (A big thing A Sure Cure for Alligator Bites / 229 where she came from.