For centuries the race has lived on a few episodes, short as the turn of a sunset. The glancing helmet of Hector that frightened one tiny child, the toothless hound of Ulysses that knew the beggar man--always it is the little lonely things that shake us. Vast masses of men and acres of guns blur into unreality. The battle hides itself in thick clouds, swaying in the night. But the cry that rang through Gerbéviller does not die away in our ears. Sister Julie has given episodes of a bitter brevity which the imagination of the race will not shake off. It is impossible to look out on the world with the same eyes after those flashes of a new bravery, a new horror. I find this sudden revelation in the lifting of the cup with the toast that signed the death of the old men. The officer was drinking a sacrament of death by murder. It is as if there in that act under the lonely tree in the pleasant fields of Gerbéviller the new religion of the Germans had perfected its rite. That rite of the social cup, held aloft in the eyes of comrades, has been a symbol for good will in all the ages. Brotherhood was being proclaimed as the host of the feast looked out on a table of comrades. At last in the fullness of time the rite, always honored, was lifted into the unassailable realm of poetry, when one greater man came who went to his death blithely from the cup that he drank with his friends. There it has remained homely and sacred in the thought of the race. Suddenly under the oak tree of Gerbéviller the rite has received a fresh meaning. The cup has been torn from the hands of the Nazarene. By one gesture the German officer reversed the course of history. He sat there very lonely, and he drank alone. The cup that he tasted was the death of men. It is no longer the lifting of all to a common fellowship. It no longer means "I who stand here am prepared to die for you": pledge of a union stronger even than death. It is suddenly made the symbol of a greater gospel: "I drink to your death. I drink alone." ADDENDUM