oldiers, stood
triumphant on the fatal hill!

* * * * *

"The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he
places it on his bleeding front.

"All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the hills
and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of
dying men."

Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience of
the gratitude of nations to those who fight their battles for them. At the
end of his noble history of the Peninsular War he lets the curtain fall
upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single sentence, thus:--

"The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America, some
for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took shipping
at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance
of the Veterans' services.

"Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and
innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken
four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from
Portugal, once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed,
wounded, or captured two hundred thousand enemies--leaving of
their own number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the
plains and mountains of the Peninsula."

Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have debased
modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity and
honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult to believe
that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and the petty officer
at sea that nation can produce a single gentleman.

Your loving old
G.P.

22

MY DEAR ANTONY,

This letter, like the last one, is concerned with war. War brings to every
man not incapacitated by age or physical defects the call of his country
to fight, and if need be to die, for it. It also exposes to view the few
pusillanimous young men who are satisfied to enjoy protection from the
horrors of invasion and the priceless boon of personal freedom, secured
to them by the self-sacrifice and valour of others, while they
themselves remain snugly at home and talk of their consciences.

Patriotism such as that which in 1914 led the flower of our race to flock
in countless thousands to the standards and be enrolled for battle in
defence of

"This precious stone set in the silver sea,"
"This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,"