r death, which added another
stain to the enemy's pages dark with blood, was the message of one who
saw the eternal verities, the things worth living and dying for.

Our men's Roll of Honor is a heavy Roll. We have lost in killed and
permanently out of the army, a million men and over 75 per cent of our
casualties are our own Island losses. Our women in every village and
in every city street have lost husbands, fathers, brothers, lovers and
friends. From every rank of life our men have died, the agricultural
labourer, the city clerk, the railway man, the miner, the engineer,
the business man, the poet, the journalist, the author, the artist,
the scientist, the heirs of great names, many of the most brilliant
of our young men. We comb out our mines and shipyards, and factories,
ceaselessly for more men. Our boys at eighteen go into the army.
From eighteen to forty-one every man is liable for service. Our
Universities have only a handful of men in them and these are
the disabled, the unfit, and men from other countries. Oxford and
Cambridge Colleges are full of Officers' Training Corps men. The
Examination Schools and the Town Hall at Oxford are Hospitals, and
Oxford and Cambridge streets are full of the blue-clad wounded, as
are so many of our cities. We are a nation at war, and at war for over
three years and everywhere and in everything we are changed.

In these years we women have lived always with the shadow of the war
over us--it never leaves us, night or day. We do not live completely
where we are in these days. A bit of us is always with our men on our
many fields of war. We live partly in France and Flanders, in Italy,
in the Balkans, in Egypt and Palestine and Mesopotamia, in Africa,
with the lonely white crosses in Gallipoli, with our men who guard us
sleeping and waking, going down to the sea in ships and under the sea,
fighting death in submarines and mines, and with those who in the air
are the eyes and the winged cavalry of our forces.

We mourn our dead, not sadly and hopelessly, though life for many of
us is emptier forever, and for many so much harder, and we wear very
little mourning. We mourn silently, and with a sure faith that our
men's supreme sacrifice is not in vain. "Greater love hath no man
than this, that he lay down his life for his friend." The little white
crosses of our graves symbolize the faith for which they die.

The message of our soldier poets who have been created by this war
and