How otherwise can we explain the extraordinary heroism shown by the boys of every army during the late war? I watched many beautiful and gallant boys, volunteers mark you, march down the streets of Sydney on their way to a quarrel which nobody understood--not even the German Kaiser who started it; and when my own turn came to go I patched up many thousands who had been shattered: the one impression made upon me was the utter vileness and beastliness of war, and the glorious courage of the boys in the line. Before the order went forth forbidding the use of Liston’s long splint in the advanced dressing stations, men with shattered lower limbs used to be brought in with their feet turned back to front. High-explosive shells would tear away half the front of a man’s abdomen; men would be maimed horribly for life, and life would never be the same again for them. Yet none seemed to complain. I know that our own boys simply accepted it all as the inevitable consequence of war, and from what I saw of the English and French their attitude of mind was much the same. The courage of the boys was amazing. I am very sure that if the average age of the armies had been sixty instead of under thirty, Amiens would never have been saved or Fort Douaumont recovered, nor would the Germans have fought so heroically as we must admit they did. Old men feel death approaching them, and they fear it. We all know that our old patients are far more nervous about death than the young. I remember a girl who had sarcoma of the thigh, which recurred after amputation, and I had to send her to a home for the dying. She did not seem very much perturbed. I suppose the proper thing to say would be that she was conscious of her salvation and had nothing to fear; but the truth was that she was a young rake who had committed nearly every crime possible to the female sex, and she died as peacefully and happily as any young member of the Church I ever knew. But who is so terrified as the old woman who trips on a rough edge of the carpet and fractures her thigh-bone? How she clings to life! What terrors attend her last few weeks on earth, till merciful pneumonia comes to send her to endless sleep!