uckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

JEAN LANG.

POSTSCRIPT

We have come, in those last long months, to date our happenings as
they have never until now been dated by those of our own generation.

We speak of things that took place "_Before the War_"; and between
that time and this stands a barrier immeasurable.

This book, with its Preface, was completed in 1914--"_Before the
War._"

Since August 1914 the finest humanity of our race has been enduring
Promethean agonies. But even as Prometheus unflinchingly bore the
cruelties of pain, of heat and of cold, of hunger and of thirst, and
the tortures inflicted by an obscene bird of prey, so have endured the
men of our nation and of those nations with whom we are proud to be
allied. Much more remote than they seemed one little year ago, now
seem the old stories of sunny Greece. But if we have studied the
strange transmogrification of the ancient gods, we can look with
interest, if with horror, at the Teuton representation of the GOD in
whom we believe as a GOD of perfect purity, of honour, and of love.
According to their interpretation of Him, the God of the Huns would
seem to be as much a confederate of the vicious as the most degraded
god of ancient worship. And if we turn with shame from the Divinity so
often and so glibly referred to by blasphemous lips, and look on a
picture that tears our hearts, and yet makes our hearts big with
pride, we can understand how it was that those heroes who fought and
died in the Valley of the Scamander came in time to be regarded not as
men, but as gods.

There is no tale in all the world's mythology finer than the tale that
began in August 1914. How future generations will tell the tale, who
can say?

But we, for whom Life can never be the same again, can say with all
earnestness: "It is the memory that the soldier leaves behind him,
like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun--that is all
which is worth caring for, which distinguishes the death of the brave
or the ignoble."

And, surely, to all those who are fighting, and suffering, and dying
for a noble cause, the GOD of gods, the GOD of battles, who is also
the GOD of peace, and the GOD of Love, has become an ever near and
eternally living entity.

"Our little