Ten years after.... The memory of the war days is fading from the mind of the world. The ten million dead lie in their graves, but life goes marching on. Self-preservation, vital interests, new and exciting problems, the human whirligig, are too absorbing for a continual hark-back to the thought of that mortality. We are no longer conscious of any gap in the ranks of youth, torn out by the machinery of destruction. We do not realise the loss of all that spirit, genius, activity and blood, except in private remembrance of some dead boy whose portrait in uniform stands on the mantelshelf. A new generation of youth has grown up since the beginning of the war. Boys of ten at that time of history are now twenty, and not much interested in that old tale. Girls who were twelve are now mothers of babes. The war! Bother the war! Let’s forget it and get on with life. In that youth is right. It is not in its nature nor in moral health to dwell on morbid memories. But it is hard on those whose service is forgotten—so soon. In England—ten years after—there are still 58,000 wounded soldiers in the hospitals—and in France great numbers more; but they are hidden away, as a painful secret of things that happened. Only now and again the sight of their hospital blue in some quiet country lane, near their hiding places, shocks one with a sharp stab of remorse. We had forgotten all that. We hate to be reminded of it. FADING MEMORIES Even the men who fought through those years seldom speak of their experience. It is fading out of their own minds, though it seemed unforgettable. They are forgetting the names of the villages in France and Flanders where they were billeted, or where they fought, or where they passed a hundred times with their guns and transport under shell fire. Good heavens!—don’t you remember?—that place where the waggons were “pasted,” where the Sergeant-Major was blown to bits, where old Dick got his “Blighty” wound? No. Something has passed a sponge across those tablets of memory—things that happened afterwards. Now and again at Divisional banquets officers try to revive the spirit of those days and exchange yarns about trench warfare and days of battle. It is queer how they remember only the jokes, the laughable things, the comradeship, the thrill. The horror has passed.