your son, who put the
honour of the regiment before all thought of fatigue or personal danger.
Such a gallant lad! We all loved him." A private, the boy's
soldier-servant, who fought with him, writes: "I wish you could have seen
him in that trench.... All the men say that he deserved the V.C.... I
don't know if we are going back to those trenches any more, but if we do,
I am going to try and lay Mr. Geoffrey to rest in some quiet place.... I
cannot bear to think that I shall not be able to be with him any more."

But how they crowd upon the mind--the "unreturning brave"! Take our
friends and neighbours in this quiet Hertfordshire country. All round us
the blows have fallen--again and again the only son--sometimes two
brothers out of three--the most brilliant--the best beloved. And I see
still the retreating figure of a dear nephew of my own, as he vanished
under the trees waving his hand to us in March last. A boy made of
England's best--who after two years in Canada, and at the beginning of
what must have been a remarkable career, heard the call of the Mother
Country, and rushed home at once. He was transferred to an English
regiment, and came to say good-bye to us in March. It was impossible to
think of Christopher's coming to harm--such life and force, such wisdom
and character also, in his strong, handsome face and thoughtful eyes! We
talked of the future of Canada--not much of the war. Then he vanished, and
I could not feel afraid. But one night in May, near Bailleul, he went out
with a listening party between the trenches, was shot through both legs by
a sniper, and otherwise injured--carried back to hospital, and after a few
hours' vain hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing only that he had
done his duty and fearing nothing. "Romance and melodrama," says Professor
Gilbert Murray, in one of the noblest and most moving utterances of the
war, "were once a memory--broken fragments living on of heroic ages in the
past. We live no longer upon fragments and memories, we have entered
ourselves upon an heroic age.... As for me personally, there is one
thought that is always with me--the thought that other men are dying for
me, better men, younger, with more hope in their lives, many of them men
whom I have taught and loved." The orthodox Christian "will be familiar
with that thought of One who loved you dying for you. I would like to say
that now I seem to be familiar with the thought that something innocent,
someth