Through four frightful years she fought with splendor, she suffered with splendor, she held on with splendor. The second battle of Ypres is but one drop in the sea of her epic courage; yet it would fill full a canto of a poem. So spent was Britain’s single line, so worn and thin, that after all the men available were brought, gaps remained. No more ammunition was coming to these men, the last rounds had been served. Wet through, heavy with mud, they were shelled for three days to prevent sleep. Many came at last to sleep standing; and being jogged awake when officers of the line passed down the trenches, would salute and instantly be asleep again. On the fourth day, with the Kaiser come to watch them crumble, three lines of Huns, wave after wave of Germany’s picked troops, fell and broke upon this single line of British--and it held. The Kaiser, had he known of the exhausted ammunition and the mounded dead, could have walked unarmed to the Channel. But he never knew. Surgeons being scantier than men at Ypres, one with a compound fracture of the thigh had himself propped up, and thus all day worked on the wounded at the front. He knew it meant death for him. The day over, he let them carry him to the rear, and there, from blood-poisoning, he died. Thus through four frightful years, the British met their duty and their death. There is the great story of the little penny steamers of the Thames--a story lost amid the gigantic whole. Who will tell it right? Who will make this drop of perfect valor shine in prose or verse for future eyes to see? Imagine a Hoboken ferry boat, because her country needed her, starting for San Francisco around Cape Horn, and getting there. Some ten or eleven penny steamers under their own steam started from the Thames down the Channel, across the Bay of Biscay, past Gibraltar, and through the submarined Mediterranean for the River Tigris. Boats of shallow draught were urgently needed on the River Tigris. Four or five reached their destination. Where are the rest? What did England do in the war, anyhow?