-were accustomed, each winter
during their great war, to celebrate at the cost of the State the
obsequies of those who had perished in the recent campaign. The bones
of the dead, arranged according to their tribes, were exhibited under
a tent and honoured for three days. In the midst of this host of the
known dead stood an empty bed, covered with tapestry and dedicated to
"the Invisible," that is, to those whose bodies it had been impossible
to recover. Let us too, before all else, in the quiet of this hall,
where none but almost religious words may be heard, raise in our midst
such an altar, a sacred and mysterious altar, to the invisible
heroines of this war, that is to say, to all those who have died an
obscure death and have left no traces and also to those who are yet
living, whose sacrifices and sufferings will never be told. Here, with
the eyes of the spirit, let us gaze upon all the heroic deeds of which
we know; but let us reserve an honoured place for those, incomparably
more numerous and perhaps more beautiful, of which we as yet know
nothing and, above all, for those of which we shall never know, for
glory has its injustices even as death has its fatalities.

2

Yet it is hardly probable that among these sacrifices we shall discern
any more admirable than that of Miss Edith Cavell. I need not recall
the circumstances of her death, for they are well-known to everybody
and will never be forgotten. Destiny left nothing undone for the
purest glory to emerge from the deepest shadow. In the depths of that
shadow it concentrated all imaginable hatred, horror, villainy,
cowardice and infamy, so that all pity, all innocent courage and
mercy, all well-doing and all sweet charity might shine forth above
it, as though to show us how low men may sink and how high a woman can
rise, as though its express and visible intention had been to trace,
with a single gesture, amid all the sorrows and the rare beauties of
this war, an outstanding and incomparable example which should at the
same time be an immortal and consoling symbol.

3

And one would say that destiny had taken pains to make this symbol as
truthful and as general as possible. It did not select a dazzling and
warlike heroine, as it would have done in the days of old: a Judith, a
Lucretia, nor even a Joan of Arc. There was no need of resounding
words, of splendid raiment, of tragic attitudes and accessories, of an
imposing background. The beauty which we f