Chapter V: Part 5

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There was only one way of sealing it up, and that was by uniting French and British forces under one single commander. Lord Milner saw it. He started up and pointed dramatically with his finger to Foch standing there with his wooden wand, and he cried out:

"There is the man."

Haig, endowed by God and nature with a fine character, at once came forward and agreed. No littleness stood in his way at that moment of destiny. Foch was the man, let Foch take the supreme command. Foch took it and poured French troops to our aid and stopped the tide and saved the great city, the railway-key of Calais and of Paris.

The great German effort had resulted first in German victory, then in a dramatic change in the leadership of the war. Doubtless the German took little stock of Foch. It seemed of good augury to our foe that the enemy should have been forced to make a change in command. Changes of the kind are seldom good in the midst of a strenuous campaign. But the sway of Foch nevertheless gave a new faith to the whole army of the Allies. The famous S.O.S. was sent to Wilson: _We have our backs to the wall but send your army quickly or we perish_. And Wilson speeded up the transport of his army in a marvellous way. He also saved us.

Amiens, whose fate was in the balance for so many days, became baptised as a shrine of the war as the enemy long-range guns sent to it fire and death unintermittently.

What new fields and cities the enemy had opened for destruction! Had the Germans stayed before the city, the Cathedral of St. Firmin might have become as remarkable a ruin as the shrine of St. Vaast. St. Firmin is the patron saint of Amiens and is supposed to hold the city in his protection, and the pious of Amiens prayed to St. Firmin and to God in March 1918 as never before. That their prayers availed whereas other cities had fallen despite all prayer is not a fact on which to lay much stress. But it was just six months to the festival of St. Firmin, and ere that happy day came round the dreadful menacing demon had fled far from their walls.

Two years later behold the procession of the relics of St. Firmin at Amiens. The Church parades in praise and mediæval glory--cherubic boys in crimson and white lace, young tonsured monks with health and life throbbing from their close-cropped skulls, aged ecclesiastics with Latinised faces, beautiful youths carrying emblems and banners, and then supported on either hand by wise and reverend fathers comes the Bishop, crowned with a gilded mitre crimson within and golden without, and streaming with two golden streamers hanging behind. He bears his golden crook, and before his arrested step and hand held up in blessing the people sway like reeds when the wind which bloweth where it listeth passes over them. From his uplifted hand and his arrested pose there flung out mysterious power. You felt it; it was the blessing of the Church imparted with all the consciousness of true succession even from Peter and from Christ.

So they bear what is left of the memory and the dust of St. Firmin, nodding as they go, looking like an ecclesiastical picture on a vast canvas, and singing to their measured steps--_Salve, Salve_.

The second round of 1918 was fought on the Lys when the Germans 'twixt Ypres on the north and Bethune in the south plunged towards Hazebrouck and St. Omer. Bailleul and Merville fell, the eminence of Kemmel was taken and Locre, and it seemed likely that the enemy would do with the sanctuary of Ypres what he had done with that of Albert.

The smashed centre of Bethune and the wilderness of its Grande Place testifies to the violence of the onset, and Hazebrouck still bears the marks of a great trembling and nervous shock. Hazebrouck had its three days of anguish when all its people fled, and the town, like a victim in a dungeon, awaited the coming of the persecutor. The cross-roads at Vieux Berquin are almost as sinister in the after-the-war light as they were then, and in all the waste fields which ran with destiny and khaki that April the rusty wire still lies in tangles. Rain streams on the choked cemeteries once but sparse with graves, now full and overflowing with the dead and their crosses. But you seek in vain for hundreds and thousands of defenders, names of V.C.'s, names of the brave undecorated--all lost now in the unknown, the plenitude of unknown soldiers.

The German won his second round, though not too well, not shaping very well. There were hammer-blows, but not the dreadful death-dealing weight of the March fighting. French troops had been hurried to Belgium by Foch, and once more they stopped the rot and possibly saved our now rather nervy army. Certainly the enemy was now having matters his own way. But Arras fortunately held, and that was our centre of defence. All expected that the next attack would be upon the city, an attempt at encirclement from the north and from the south. A wet spring wore on to early summer and all the army waited.

The third attack was of an entirely unexpected kind, being an almost overwhelming blow at France and France alone--an attempt to put her entirely out of gear and make it impossible for Foch to send more troops to help the British army, an attempt to destroy the spirit and the mobility of the army of France. The enemy advanced on a front broader even than that of March 21st, and found an even thinner, weaker line of defenders. Once more Germany was able to do even more than she dreamed, and plunged towards Paris, making the sky drone and tremble with the ominous thunder of her approaching guns.

As we all know now the enemy went too far, and had not the men to man his greatly extended lines or the labour to reorganise the new rear. He had spent his energy too lavishly, and Foch had all that was necessary, the one extra punch which sent the German reeling even in the moment which should have held his greatest pride. The fourth round was won by Foch and the Americans. The fifth by the British when they rolled the foe back from Amiens. After that Fritz was a lost man and floundered backward homeward, playing only for time, and only on his defensive, with all the triumph gone, hope gone, faith gone, and only punishment and humiliation ahead of him. In but a short while after the most terrible defeats it could be said that the Allies had won the war.

The land o'er which the great advance was made is quiet enough now. To the towns and cities of the back areas the circus is coming for the first time since the war. After the leaping from trapeze to trapeze in mid-air, after the walking the tight rope, and the facing wild beasts in their cages, and other feats of daring, the clowns come tumbling into the arena. So it is also in life. There is one all in Turkey-red riding backward on an ass, telling all and sundry how much more clever he is than the genuine heroes they have been clapping. He gains in the long run more applause than the tight-rope dancer. Then two funny Columbines with air-blown bladders pretend to fight and whack at one another with resounding boshes, clumps and raps, laying one another out, panting for breath, exhausting themselves, almost expiring, and yet weakly hitting out with their quaint weapons. And the populace forgets the thrill of the spectacle of the man in the lions' cage making wild beasts jump through hoops of fire. The clowns are to its taste. The scene-shifters are quietly preparing the arena for the next heroic item--"A Roman spectacle when the gladiators meet"--and the clowns divert public attention from the carpentering of such a show until all is ready for the heroes to come out. A fourth clown all the while strikes heroic attitudes and mimics the after-the-war celebrities with apt buffoonery--now he is Wilson with the fourteen points, now he is D'Annunzio in mock heroic pose saying "J'y suis, j'y reste," now Lloyd George making the Germans pay by letting the Germans off paying. The malice of the buffoons provokes great mirth and takes the attention of the crowd so well that the heroes are almost forgotten, Tom Wildwest glowering from one of the exits and handling his rope and running noose as if he'd like to lasso the whole bunch of clowns and pull them out of the arena and the public gaze.

In the summer of 1918 there was a waiting time. The enemy was held and his utter defeat was manifest, but Time paused and the denouement paused. The French and Americans carried on. The British reorganised. The Germans began the knight's tour of the board with the right move first. The British army was bored with the war and looked homeward. Special wires conveyed the Derby result and the verdict of the Pemberton-Billing case. Pemberton-Billing became a great hero of the rank and file. The book of the 47,000 names of people who could be blackmailed was a popular idea--such is the readiness to believe evil.

At a battalion Sports near Saulty the Duke of Connaught watched the battalion clowns arrange a race for the tiniest tots of the French village. One clown had printed on his back "Breezy Bacchus" and the other "One of the 47,000," which was thought a most amusing and up-to-date cognomen. "One of the 47,000" won the obstacle race by and by. He had won the obstacle race each annual Sports of his battalion, an unwounded Tipperary man who had come right through, not only the hazards of so many races, but of the great race itself. Fate however claimed him at last when the war was nearly over, and a lone cringing gas shell sneaking through the air came and took his leg off. The French villagers, whose children he had guided in the baby race, shrugged their shoulders and had nothing to say.

The war-sun which was now setting did not sink in a grey haze or in mere cloud, but in blood. To take the final victory-march of even one Division, from Arras to Maubeuge--is it not marked by fresh graves all the way? The old and the new laid down their lives prodigally.

There is an extra sorrow for their death now because the pathos of being so near to deliverance and yet missing it was not known then. Though the German was beaten the war might last for years. A common gag used to be--

"Heard the news?"

"What's that? The war over?"

"All over bar the shouting."

But it was ironical, and there were few who saw the faint gleam of the new hope which came with the German retreat.

The Army did not know when it began its advance that the familiar ruins of old villages were being left behind for good, that Berles au Bois with its growing graveyard and ruined church was placed finally behind, Monchy, Blairville, Hamelincourt, St. Leger, Bullecourt, Ecoust, behind for ever, that Albert, Maricourt, Bapaume, re-conquered Peronne, were all permanently held and soon to be left far in obscurity in the rear. It is strange to come back over this track again and see the site of hideous and monstrous latrines now overgrown with rankest weeds, to see the ruined barns all re-roofed, to see the dank acre into which, wrapped in the flag, your comrades were lowered down, to see what was left of the village church of Berles now brought flat because as it stood it was a menace, to see the place where but for the grace of God you might yourself be lying with a cross above your head, to see Monchy lifting itself with great difficulty from its sunken blocks of stone, to listen to the stillness and deadness of old lifeless ruins, to cross the stubble fields to Adinfer and hear the petrol plough methodically scouring the old lines, to approach once more the dreadfulness of Ayette.

The villagers have come back to the craters of death. There is an estaminet where was nothing before; there are salvage-made huts with "baby-elephant" roofs built o'er spots where for days lay the dead in a torture of wire. A family is in the estaminet, it was divided into five parts by the war--five members of the family each in a different place and none of them in touch with any other, each believing the other four dead, two in different parts of Germany, one in Paris, one in Belgium, one in the Pyrenees. They are poor people, touched by their suffering to tenderness and generosity, and when there comes to them one who served as a soldier in the war they spread their best before him and do not want to take money for it--wonderful for France. But the people who have suffered are the best people there as elsewhere.

At Ablainzville the new brick cabins grow into being amid the high seared masts of her dead trees. At sunset the hard-working peasants are still in the fields. They have heaped old iron and wire on to the roads, and filled up the shell-holes and burned the weeds and broken the intractable hard moorland with tractor-drawn ploughs. They have riven the sturdy roots of the docks and the reeds, they have driven St. John's wort and rocket and willow-herb from the grain-field, turning up the tramped-down battered earth in huge slabs and chunks. The league of death which goes over the brow of the hill, that old no-man's land which the machine-guns swept is now a great black upturned drive of ploughing in which alight thousands of crows, all extruding from the earth and discussing what they find, talking and grabbing, fluttering and flying. Sodden green equipment has been ploughed into the earth and still lies half exposed, and helmets like little coal-buckets disturb here and there the even surface of the land. It is heavy going, and your boots want to lift tons of mother earth, but you struggle on with eyes furtively engaged in "spotting" here a shell and there a bomb. Next year the corn will cover up all our sins.

The peasants complain that the Government gives them nothing. The Germans replaced some of the cattle they stole, but how about the French who commandeered their horses at the beginning of the war and in exchange gave them a merely nominal sum. In the stricken areas how few are the horses now! The conservative peasant who does not like changing his agricultural habits has been forced to the use of the petrol engine. His chief motive force is the old lorry engine. But of course he does more with that than he did with the horse, and when one has walked right across the zone of desolation and come to the little-touched farms on the other side one cannot but feel that the peasants working their horses there are not getting on so quickly as the deprived ones with their motors.

Many of the refugees when they came back started at an absolute zero. Their plight would have driven a less stubborn people to despair, but they set-to and worked, and can already show a dumbfounding progress. Theirs is a hard life without luxury and with little food, but with the capital of their toiling hands they are making wealth for themselves and France once more. The people of the war-lands will recover quicker than their Governments, and whilst with every year the plight of the national exchequer gets worse the plight of the domestic exchequer will improve. There are too many parasites feeding on the Governments, and the latter have too many obligations in the matter of paying interest on loan. All France is placarded with appeals to French people to take up State-loans--the object of such loans being to get money to pay the interest on past loans. French people cannot be persuaded to pay onerous taxes. The Germans, without great commercial activity, cannot make the French deficit good, and we see the State sliding slowly but steadily downward like a loosened avalanche toward a precipice. But in the light of the French peasants' steady unremitting toil one need have little fear for the nation itself. It will get rid of this type of Government and the mountains of debt when the time comes. Long after sunset, in the after-murk of night, sound the droning of the petrol-ploughs on the old battlefields, and the clatter of hammer and plane in the stricken villages.--Vive la France!

* * * * *

It is twenty miles to Cambrai by the seemingly Druidical remains of Lagnicourt and the life-clusters of Queant, Pronville, Moeuvres, Fontaine. Cambrai is resurgent. No one is in mourning except those widows whom black suits. The merry-go-rounds and the razzle-dazzle with all manner of toy-booths and gipsy-shows occupy the market-place on which grandiose buildings with broken windows stare. In the town gardens is a statue without a head, and on its base is engraved--"_Son invention fut un bienfait pour son pays_."

He probably made some improvement in the manufacture of silk, but an ironical British soldier has written in English beneath--_He invented the gun stock_.

On the way out from Cambrai the towns of Boussieres and St. Hilaire look as if no war had been, and the trains are all running on the road to Solesmes. Where men stalked their foes along the railway embankment, where men won military medals and D.C.M.s and one the V.C. all is perfect prose. Where so many died and risked their lives a life-insurance office has reopened. All slumbers on the road to Le Quesnoy and Bavai. You have passed through the war area and come to the unscarred green of innocent fields and the undesolated symmetry of unscathed woods. Peasants lead the horses in the plough, and cows in plenty graze in sun-steeped pastures.

It is November 10th and the same strong highway on which two years ago the army marched to the end of the war. At the end of a fair fine afternoon the sun is sinking slowly but must be in eclipse ere it set. Peasants are sitting on heaps of stones at La Longueville looking westward. In the smoky capitals of Europe nothing will be seen, but something is due to happen if the sky keeps clear and will be visible at the last outposts of the war.

From the grandeur of the setting sun pale shadows are cast of posts and cows and houses and railings and heaps of stones. Unexpectedly they faint away as something steals upon the splendour of the radiant disc and stops the brightness of the rays. Myriads of wisps of cloud, like tiny hands, assist at the eclipse, laying the sun to rest in a dreadful bloody bath, agonising and bleeding and growing less and going down, with evil triumphing over good. Out, brief candle! Yes, it is out--it is night. The last day of the war is done--tomorrow Armistice. The reaper has put up his scythe--the angel of death has gone by. A bitter wind passes swiftly along the high-road, just touching you, just making you aware that something invisible and unkind has passed you, having a going and a coming which is not yours.

So in a mood which has changed you walk the last miles of the war--to the fortress of Maubeuge. Here is gloomy smoky Douzies, and there, yes at that very spot, is the place where the Brigade messenger was accosted and you read his message--_Hostilities will cease as from eleven o'clock_. Yonder the factory sheds where you heard the first lecture on demobilisation, where you sang "Take me back to dear old Blighty!" with such a will, and a free issue of rum punch was made to all. There the erstwhile deserted steel works which men said would be years before they worked again. The great stacks smoke, belying the prophecy, and on the night wind comes the clangour of tireless machinery working for France, working for Peace. On the railway all the twisted rails are gone, the lines gleam with the brightness of train-wheels and go straight to Maubeuge. Upon the roadway lie the disjecta membra of an armoured train marked Lot 1 and Lot 2 and likely to remain till time itself remove them.

You descend into the trough where the moat goes round the fortress, and by a wooden bridge enter Maubeuge, the city of the end of the war, one of the cities where the war ended. At Maubeuge then let us be silent with those who are silent whilst at Westminster the Unknown is buried and the Cenotaph unveiled and at Paris the Arc de Triomphe receives its guest.

November the eleventh in the morning--there is Mass in the Cathedral for the _poilu inconnu_, the anonymous soldier of France, and about an empty coffin swathed with the tricolour are ten high candles. The sacrifice is sanctified with holy water and incense. The divine elements are raised from the Altar. The throngs of the pious all cross themselves. Comes the alarm crash of the Sanctus thrice repeated, the mumbo-jumbo of fast-gabbled Latin, the exultant organ. You stand wedged in by a pillar, the only Englishman there now, and as your eye ranges o'er the scene it reads on the Cathedral wall the inscription which is nearest. _N'oublie pas pecheur endurci que c'est pour la troisième fois que Jesus est tombé!_ "Forget not, hardened sinner, that it is now for the third time that Jesus has fallen," suggestive and unforgettable monition given in the half-light of the Cathedral.

A Te Deum which does not rend the sky nor the Cathedral roof passes sweetly o'er our heads, and the congregation with its wreaths and flags files out to march with bands to the cemeteries of Maubeuge. It is still not eleven by the clock. But it will be eleven in the Place des Casernes where the Guards were drawn up on parade that November morning. The barrack square then!

Behold it dirty and drab. A squad in sabots is being detailed by a corporal for fatigue duty. They answer their names, their old tunics are all undone, they shuffle across the square. But it is eleven. Silence then. Let us be silent with all who are silent.

_EPILOGUE_

The afternoon train speeds from Maubeuge to Paris. "Am I right for Paris?" you ask, and a Frenchman replies facetiously "Nach Paris, nach Paris." In a few hours you roll up the whole Western front. You traverse infinite graveyards and scenes of desolation like an arrow of thought, and alight where the German soldiers wished to be. The train has come from Berlin: it has passed through Cologne and the zone held by the occupying army. It roars forward to St. Quentin, Noyon, Compiègne, like the symbol of the March offensive. But in all the little shattered towns and villages joy-flags are flying and the bands are playing. It is to-day a fête of French victory and French peace. Besides being Armistice Day it is the Cinquantenaire of the Republic, the day of the celebration of the first fifty years of the present Republic of France, and Paris will be alight from end to end to-night with fairy lights. Paris and France will render homage to the Republic which brought victory. In 1870 under the fatal Government of Napoleon the Third the hated German conquered France. Then the Napoleons fell and Gambetta made possible "la revanche du Droit." It could hardly have been predicted that within fifty years the stricken unstable France of 1870 would lay the Prussian low. The victory over the Germans has been an enormous confirmation of the success of the "Third Republic" and has shed a glory on the line of Presidents from Thiers to Millerand which is perhaps not entirely appreciated in other countries. The Republic celebrating its fiftieth birthday on November 11th sunned itself in as much glory as the Army or the Nation. It is true that "un soldat sans nom, representant la foule heroique des poilus, repose dans l'Arc de Triomphe"--a nameless soldier representing the heroic crowd who fought is buried now in the Arc de Triomphe--but it is also true that the heart of Gambetta carried in a chariot accompanied the hearse of the unknown soldier, and whilst the soldier was buried in the first storey of the triumphal arch the heart of Gambetta was placed in the Pantheon itself. All must redound to the greatness of France and of the Republic.

As you step from the train at Paris you realise that everyone is out for gaiety even before the gaiety has commenced. The Parisians are holding on to one another, humming and singing baby-song, making believe to stumble as they walk. Gone are the care and solemnity of the weekday Paris crowd. A heaviness has been shed, everyone feels light as if there was quicksilver in his heels. Evening is just turning to night and all houses are giving forth their people, and they stream to the centre in ever increasing crowds--all gay, all light-hearted, all without a thought of ever coming home. The city is cleverly decorated with massed flags, arcades of flags, but without those strings of bunting which so often look like coloured washing hanging out to dry. The illuminations are to be most elaborate. Hundreds of thousands of francs are being spent in coloured light effects. There will be a torchlight procession, massed bands, and street dancing till morning. Long lines of men and women holding on to one another plunge through the crowds, and scream, and break, and join again. Everyone is wearing a little flag of the Republic. Men and women are to be seen carrying little red paper lanterns on bamboo sticks. Every restaurant and café is crammed and jammed with people with flushed faces. The waiters, having lost control, bring you dishes you have not ordered, but you graciously accept them faute de mieux. Hawkers keep bellowing the last editions of the papers, especially of _L'intransigeant_, which says that the meaning of the festivity is that the Allies are agreed to force Germany to fulfil the treaty to the letter. Night meanwhile has become night with no stars above and all the stars below.

The crowds have become immense. If you are at the Place de la Concorde where part of the torchlight procession is forming up and men are playing on the crowd with ghastly searchlights, then you are likely to remain at the Place de la Concorde. It will take you two hours to struggle to the Place de l'Opera. On the Underground railway some stations are blocked, and no one can get either in or out--notably Hotel de Ville. Out at the Arc de Triomphe there is a cavalry guard with drawn sabres. The Arc very fittingly has no illumination, but its dark mass catches the light beams from the buildings around. No one knows what is going to happen here, all the little folk stand on tip-toe and strain their eyes and yet see nought. Lots of girls are mounted on men's shoulders with legs round men's necks and their ankles grasped in male hands, and they certainly see the nothing which is to be seen. All are laughing, all are ready to sing and to roll in gaiety. Presently some statesmen in carriages pass out between lines of cavalrymen; big Bertha, the great gun, follows them and then an empty Roman chariot and the hearse on which the _poilu inconnu_ was carried. But even when these pass the crowd remains riveted to the place where the unknown soldier reposes--constantly expecting some marvel of the night to start from there.

Similar crowds hold the Place Vendome where Napoleon stands on his column of stone, the St. Simon of Paris. This statue also commemorates a national victory over Germany, though it elevates one soldier so high. The design of the frieze at the foot of the column is one of accoutrements and weapons and adornments and uniforms and guns, but without a limb or a face anywhere, the meaning being that one man wore all the glory. Here is exhibited not much joy in the Republic but a whole series of advertisement for French State loans. On the whole, the Cinquantenaire of the Republic may be a good advertisement for Government Stock. All manner of provincials have come to Paris for this day, and there is no doubt they are dazzled by the grandeur of France.

At the Palais Royal there is one of the most radiant designs in coloured lights. The whole front of the place is covered with a picture of light which reminds one of the advertisements of the great white way between 40th and 50th Street, New York. Crimson and emerald and gold tell the glory of the fifty years of the Republic, the numbers 1870 and 1920 being festooned with dazzling light, and the names of all the Presidents in one great row--Thiers, MacMahon ... to Deschanel and Millerand--given the prominence of a dynasty. On all the sidewalks down below are trees of naked flames, gas-pipes with branches coming up out of the pavement and instead of leaves little jets of twinkling flame at which the crowd lights its cigarettes. The entrances to the grand avenues are surmounted by fantastic arches of most gorgeous illuminated colouring. In front of all this stand men and women thoroughly epaté, hypnotised by it, with mouths open and eyes dilated.

"Oh but it's wonderful!" "I cannot take my eyes off it, can you?" "Look, neighbour, just look at that, eh!" "Ah but look!" "What splendour!" "What an effect!" And there is audible all the while a continuous collective low murmur of approbation and satisfaction.

You walk slowly along the Avenue de l'Opera. There are uninterrupted rows of footlights along the bases of first and second storeys throwing a lurid glamour on solemn and stately tricolours. So it is all the way to the Opera House, and happy crowds, fluttering and chattering, now breaking into an infection of expectancy when all push forward to see some imagined interest somewhere, and then lurching back in gay disillusion and laughter. The lofty buildings like monuments to the goddess of Trade look down on diminutive people with bright faces and round heads, and the stone itself of Paris seems indulgent.

Away however in those strange fields covered with darkness at this midnight hour, unilluminated, lie the silent ones, crosses without end--the signs of life laid down. France will not forget them and we shall not forget.

So let us leave this gaiety behind and take the midnight train for Calais, for Dover, for London, for the Cenotaph, the Abbey, for new life. It is a full train and pulls out soberly from the gay city, and bears onward, onward to the little channel and the waiting boat which ere the dawn shall face the wonderful white cliffs of Albion and home.

The most enduring moment of Armistice Day will be the silence at eleven, the moment of communion. In America in many cities work ceased at eleven but every one was instructed to make the utmost noise possible. Thus a year ago at New Orleans the writer of these lines listened to an infernal din of train whistles, factory syrens, steam horns and hooters, clashing church-bells, roaring Klaxon-horns, hammering of anvils, squeaking of trumpets, and shouts of people. And the thought inevitably came--the West does not understand. It did not suffer as we did and came into a share in it all too late. Only the end of a small war can express itself in noise; the end of such an one as this in Europe was silence.

And a fitting monument of silence is the Cenotaph, the empty tomb. England is very happy in the Cenotaph, much more happy than in the Edith Cavell statue, which leaves out the last words of the kind nurse, does not say "_Patriotism is not enough_," but writes "Brussels Dawn" instead, making her a kindler of anger against a foe rather than a salver of wounds. The impersonal cenotaph, without any Cross or weeping Christ, or rampant lions, without even the pronoun "our" which some wished to see upon it--"Our glorious dead," instead of "The glorious dead," can stand for all who laid down their lives baptised or unbaptised, white or coloured, friend or foe. For even Germans had to die that Europe might be free.

So in leaving the fields of the dead and the beginning and the end of the war and Paris itself, you come naturally to the Cenotaph, the stone which gathers to itself all the experience and all that was sacred in the war--the altar at the summit of a thousand weary steps. It stands in the midst of England's great street of Government, 'twixt Nelson and the Abbey, and says to all who pass--"Go and do thou likewise." To all the selfish, "_We were not selfish_;" to the clamorous, "_We are silent, yet we speak_;" to the strident and ambitious, to the self-seekers and the cynical, to those who live as though there had been no sacrifice, to those who sneer at the ideal, "_We suffered and died that you might have your life, that all might have more life; we suffered and died for the good of the whole!_"

When Millerand was elected President of France his supporters insisted always that they had found a man whose public life would be worthy of France _and of her dead_. France's ideal is that through the sacrifice of her sons France should become "greater yet." Our men did not die that England might become greater, but that Europe might be saved from tyranny and greed, and it is for us and our public men to see that their sacrifice shall never seem to grow barren.

It will grow barren unless we who now live are ready to continue the sacrifice. No good comes into the world but after struggle and pain. No new life comes but through death, no common weal is gained without giving and serving. Our common life must have a foundation of human hearts, ready to give, ready to live, for England and for us all.

It hath been said: "He liveth best who is always ready to die."

It can be put in a new way: "He liveth best who is always ready
to put all upon the Altar."

Humanity is well served when nations are ready to sacrifice
themselves for her good.

She is worst served by the nations who still preserve the
tribal instinct to fight and destroy their neighbours.

She is worst served by the nations who are enslaving other
nations.

And that nation is most alive which has most people ready to
sacrifice themselves and their estate.

That nation liveth worst which contains the most selfish.

Of Christ it was written: He saved others; Himself he could not
save. But the selfish man saves himself first and then thinks
of others.

The selfish man is quarrelsome and runs easily to law; he
exacts guarantees; he counts his costs; he heavily insures; he
holds what he does not want and is afraid of another getting
it.

That nation liveth best whose men and women are freest for an
adventure.

But worst whose men and women are most cautious.

He is most happy who has run to the Altar and surrendered his
_all_ there to God and then found a will and a way in which to
live.

For most, alas! there is no altar visible, no way to an altar.
They do not know what the Altar is nor what it is for.

Business and war and hate and selfish desire have hidden it
from men's eyes.

Only when the cloud lifts the Altar is disclosed, and men
commonly when they see it leave all that they have and run to
it and fling themselves before it in tears.

It is the grand altar of humanity. The altar of _all_ on which
the _one_ sacrifices himself.

It is the altar of the sacrifice of Christ.

The Cross.

The quartering of humanity--an altar in the midst of the
people.

All education and literature and religious mission should be to
one end--that the way to the Altar may be kept clear.

It is work to clear away all the obstructions and the fogs and
mists.

Sweet singing, pious exhortation, the reading of books, love of
the dim religious light of churches--these should not be ends
in themselves.

Humanity has its pious part which goes to church; but it does
not need the organisation of the pious.

Humanity has its charitable part but it does not need the
organisation of the charitable.

Humanity has its cultures but it does not stand in need of
"schools of thought" and "cults" and "intelligentsia,"

But humanity does need sacrifice upon the one great Altar,
every day and all days.

The Cenotaph rising in our midst may be our altar. We may leave our flowers there, the incense-smoke of burning hearts, but the flowers should be our lives. The Cenotaph after all is only the visible sign of the great invisible Cenotaph of humanity which stands in the midst of the ages, an empty tomb in memory of all those who have gone before--of those whose sacrifice _without ours_ is not perfect.

* * * * *

At Westminster Abbey they have buried the dead soldier among poets and statesmen. They have dug up from France Tom, Dick, or Harry, one of us, unnamed, unknown, who laughed and talked and marched and fired and suffered in the war, one of the many who are always unknown. He did guard duty no doubt in France. He is put on sentry again. Touching as it is to have a soldier in the dim light of the Abbey where so many can shed invisible tears, it had been better perhaps in a stern era to have posted him at St. Stephen's, at the entry to Parliament, that he might challenge in his silence all who enter there to stand for England--

"Who goes there?"

"Friend."

"Advance and be recognised!"

"Pass, friend!"

Proceed at your peril if you cannot meet the challenge of the dead!

PRINTED BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C.4 F.100.121

End of Project Gutenberg's The Challenge of the Dead, by Stephen Graham

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The challenge of the deadChapter V: Part 5

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