For in the plain below that little height the great battalions went forward, rank upon rank upon rank; it was a review and it was a battle and it was a campaign. Mad imagery! the uniforms were the uniforms of gala, the drum-majors went before the companies of the Guard, gigantic, twirling their gigantic staves; the lifted trumpets of the Cuirassiers sounded as though upon some great stage, for the mere glory of the sound. And mass upon mass, regular, instinct with purpose, innumerable, the army passed below. There was no end to it. He knew, he was certain, as he strained his eyes, that it would never end. It was afoot, and it would march for ever. Far off, beyond the line, upon the flank of it, distant and terrible went the packed mass of the guns, and you could hear faintly amid the other noises of the advance the clatter-clank-clank of the limber. And from so far off he saw the leading sabres of commanders saluting him from his old arm. Here again was a mixture for him of things that do not mix in the true world: Glory and Despair. This endless army was his, and yet would go on beyond him. It was his and not his. There was room upon the colours for a million names of victories, but every victory in some way carried the stamp of defeat. And yet seeing all that pageant as the precursor of failure, he saw it also as something constructive. He thought of wood that burns and is consumed, but is the fuel of a flame of fire and all that fire can do. As he so thought, like a wind and a spirit blowing through the whole came some vast conception of a God. And once again the mixed, the dual feeling seized him, more greatly than before. It was a God that drove them all, and him. And that God was in his childhood, and he remembered his childhood very clearly. It was something of which he had been convinced in childhood, a security of good.... Look how the army moved!... And now it had halted. Here his mind failed, and he had died. It was Napoleon. On Rest There was a priest once who preached a sermon to the text of “Abba, Father.” On that text one might preach anything, but the matter that he chose was “Rest.” He was not yet in middle age, and those who heard him were not yet even young. They could not understand at all the moment of his ardent speech, and even the older men, seeing him to be but in the central part of life, wondered that he should speak so. His eyes were illuminated by the vision of something distant; his heart was not ill at ease, but, as it were, fixedly expectant, and he preached from his little pulpit in that little chapel of the Downs, with rising and deeper powers of the voice, so that he shook the air; yet all this energy was but the praise or the demand for the surcease of energy, and all this sound was but the demand for silence.