m not crying." And the paddles churned faster, and they passed into
the drizzle and the haze. Weeks later I read how one man of that
regiment--the regiment of my own county--killed another ... and a few
days later I read that he had done so in a drunken brawl. He was not
from the island, that man, and I know not who he is. His mother
doubtless sent him forth to fight as a hero for his King, and he became
a murderer under the fostering of the State.

Out of the clean countryside they were taken, these men, and the State
that summoned them, and whose call they answered, surrounded them with
temptations. Away from the influence of mother and sister and
sweetheart, wearied and worn with the hard toil of preparation, the
State opened the canteen and said, "Take your ease thus," and they did
so. The Secretary of War made appeals to them. "Be sober," said he,
"avoid alcohol, that the State, through your self-denial, may live."
But the State said, "See, I have made ample provision for you, so that
you may disregard the noble advice my servant gives you." They came in
their thousands across the Atlantic from the far North-West at the call
of their mother--clean and sober--and their mother opened the canteen
for their benefit on the plain. Such a world as that dwelt in the
imagination of Dean Swift--I never imagined that it could exist here
and now. And in that world of the cities of the plain, what reward are
we preparing for the men who are baring their breasts to the arrows,
standing between us and death? When they come back, war-worn, to what
will they return? To homes in which the fires are extinguished, the
candles burnt down to the socket; the cupboards bare, the children
famished and neglected? Is that to be the guerdon of their sacrifice;
is it for that that they have gone down into hell? Surely it cannot be
for that! A wave has passed over us, raising us to the realisation of
the higher values of things. Words live for us now which were dead
yesterday. A beam of light has fallen into the chamber of imagery, and
the word _Temperance_ has risen from the couch on which it lay dying,
and it claims us for its own. Through it we can make the world know
that we are worth fighting for--worth that the young, the strong, and
the brave should take everything they hold dear--their ideals, their
love, their little children unborn--and throw them into the trench, and
there give themselves and their dreams to death fo