"O Star," he murmured, "I need not thy glimmering light, for I know my way. The road may have appeared dark at first when my eyes were unaccustomed to its sharp turns, but for a year it has been divinely illumined for me. Even if it grew longer each day, it will never seem dark again. Although torn by thorns and cut by stones, nothing can make me turn back. I know that I shall go on, steadfast to the end. I behold before me Victory.... But there,--behind me, is a multitude sorely troubled in the darkness. "Now, as the old year revolves on its rusty hinges, those who wait at home live over in their troubled hearts the events which marked its passing. They think of the barbarous hordes of the Orient which the German has caught in his train; Turks and Bulgarians, Kurds and Malissores, and they overlook the great nations enrolled under the banner of civilization. They brood over lands ground under the iron heel of the Teuton and overlook the Empires that we hold; here, West and East Africa, four times as large as all Germany, with their thousands of miles of railroads and their diamond mines; there, the Islands of Oceania and the fortress of Asia: Kiao-Tcheou, which the Kaiser has proclaimed the pearl of his colonies. They are alarmed at the chaff that Germany gathers in her lawless course and they do not see the mighty girders that stay France. But we who are the girders, we know better, we see farther. "O Star, teach those who are not in the trenches.... Confidence! "By the light of the past we behold the future. Whenever an army, seized with the frenzy of conquest, has forced its way into a far land, abandoning the cradle whence it drew its life and strength, it has wasted away, it has perished from utter exhaustion. Like stones loosened from a solid wall, it has disintegrated. Like the grain of dust which the wind has blow away, it has vanished never to return. "More than a century ago legions attempted the conquest of Egypt. They were the most magnificent in the world. Their chiefs bore the names of Desaix, Kleber and Bonaparte. But they had not the mastery of the seas, and returned not from the burning sands of the desert.... Think also of the time when the most formidable army of Europe, led by the greatest conqueror the world has ever known, tried to overwhelm the vast Russian Empire. But the empire was mightier than the Great Army, and it returned not from the glacial solitude of the steppes.... So let it go far, ever farther on, that German army already decimated, panting, exhausted; let it reach the Tigris, the Euphrates, even far off India! It will not return. "O Star, teach those who are not in the trenches.... History!