"If you don't do your duty now," I told them, "you may live to be old men. But even if you do, you will regret it! Yours will be a sorrowful old age. In the years to come, mayhap, there'll be a wee grandchild nestling on your knee that'll circle its little arms about your neck and look into your wrinkled face, and ask you: "'How old are you, Grandpa? You're a very old man.' "How will you answer that bairn's question?" So I asked the young men. And then I answered for them: "I don't know how old I am, but I am so old that I can remember the great war." "And then"--I told them, the young men who were wavering--"and then will come the question that you will always have to dread--when you have won through to the old age that may be yours in safety if you shirk now! For the bairn will ask you, straightaway: 'Did _you_ fight in the great war, Grandpa? What did you do?' "God help the man," I told them, "who cannot hand it down as a heritage to his children and his children's children that he fought in the great war!" I must have impressed many a brave lad who wanted only a bit of resolution to make him do his duty. They tell me that I and my band together influenced more than twelve thousand men to join the colors; they give me credit for that many, in one way and another. I am proud of that. But I am prouder still of the way the boys who enlisted upon my urging feel. Never a one has upbraided me; never a one has told me he was sorry he had heard me and been led to go. It is far otherwise. The laddies who went because of me called me their godfather, many of them! Many's the letter I have had from them; many the one who has greeted me, as I was passing through a hospital, or, long afterward, when I made my first tour in France, behind the front line trenches. Many letters, did I say? I have had hundreds--thousands! And not so much as a word of regret in any one of them. It was not only in Britain that I influenced enlistments. I preached the cause of the Empire in Canada, later. And here is a bit of verse that a Canadian sergeant sent to me. He dedicated it to me, indeed, and I am proud and glad that he did. "ONE OF THE BOYS WHO WENT"