Scientists tell us that nothing is in reality ever lost or wasted and a battle field gives a most striking illustration of this law of the indestructibility of matter. We are prone to say that war is all waste, and that the enormous quantities of iron and steel, trees and horses (and even men), which are used up become a fearful waste in nature. Yet it is literally true as a thoughtful Irishman said to me in France, "Nature protects the land." In other words, Mother Earth from which everything comes protects and perpetuates herself so that no nation or generation can destroy her. All trees which are battered to pieces and all the flesh which decays and rots, go back to earth once more to fertilize and season it so that in the next generation it will bring forth and bear plentifully. As the Good Book says: "All go to one place; all is of the dust. The body returneth to the earth as it was and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it." There is no waste in the material universe. The only waste which comes from war materially is for the present generation in that things which were in a form which we could use have been changed to a form less useful but which will be used sometime again. The great waste of war as I look at it is the moral and spiritual waste where men become fiends and go out to conquer and steal and rape and kill, thus using up their spiritual powers and possibilities in destructive enterprises which might have been put toward constructive elevation of the race. Men lose their souls instead of saving them. And yet--the fiendishness of one country brings out the angel of the other in causing men to rouse to duty and to honor and justice, whereas without this incentive who knows but that we might sink down in self-sufficiency and retrograde, thus all of us losing our souls? It seems that all through God's universe there is struggle and strife, and that moral and spiritual fiber require these things for their best development. The work of Christ, Christianity, prospered because it had to struggle for existence, and when a nation or an individual ceases to struggle it goes backward. This thought may be a Job's comforter to those who pay the fearful price and yet we must look at it in this way. Men must fight to get the highest freedom, not lie back and accept their fate, else they have only the freedom of the Germans under the Hohenzollerns. There is always some remnant of salvage out of the most fearful waste. Thus earth goes in a cycle. CHAPTER XIX CAMOUFLAGE