feet of Kitchener's great army.
They marched gayly by. The drums beat. The passers-by stopped. Here
and there an open carriage or an automobile drew up, and pale men,
some of them still in bandages, sat and watched. In their eyes was the
same flaming eagerness, the same impatience to get back, to be loosed
against the old lion's foes.

All through England, all through France, all through the tragic corner
of Belgium that remains to her, were similar armies drilling and
waiting, equally young, equally eager, equally resolute. And the thing
that they were going to I knew. I had seen it in that mysterious
region that had swallowed up those who had gone before; in the
trenches, in the operating rooms of field hospitals, at outposts where
the sentries walked hand in hand with death.

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle.
War is a boy carried on a stretcher, looking up at God's blue sky with
bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a
child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in
burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race,
battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an
old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorosa for the son she
has given.

For King and Country!

THE END

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