Doubtless every man who was in the Army and took a chance of death and yet escaped, must have reflected on his good fortune, the strange light of Providence which fell upon his destiny and spared him whilst on all hands his friends and neighbours and fellow-countrymen had fallen. As the soldier left the Army and became civilian again he inevitably thought to himself--"Whereas I might have been dead I am alive; whereas I might be bond I am free." And some indeed could add "Whereas I might have been a cripple, or blind, or lamed, or a neurasthenic or a shell-shocked broken man I am sound and fit and have a whole life and freedom to give to the new time which comes with the blessing of peace." The Frenchman came back to a glorified and magnified France; to a proved capacity to defeat and hold in check a deadly and historical enemy. The Englishman came back to a free England, to a nation who was queen of the nations, to a larger and more untrammelled world-empire; the Belgian to a justified and safeguarded Belgium; the American to an America which had achieved for the first time in history a complete sense of nationhood and unity. The Serbian returned to a resurrected Serbia and a prospective future of Southern Slav greatness. Of the Italian, who joined in the war as a bargain with the others and did not fight primarily for our ideals, we will say nothing. But how near we all were to being beaten, and to realising the very opposite of the present happy potentialities. But a turn in the wheel or a hair in the scale, and the French would have been slaves, the Englishman beaten on land if not on sea would have returned cowering to his little island, empire falling from his grasp and almost the whole bill of the war to defray by the efforts of his restive working-class population; the Belgian a German subject; the American flouted and anxious with the shadow of a terrible new war to fight all by himself in the years to come; the Serbian a peon of Bulgaria or shackled in the heavy rusty Austrian irons. When we are in despair in 1920, 1921, 1922 we should all say to ourselves--"Whereas we might have been slaves we are free; whereas we might have been dead we are alive----" It is what the graveyards of France tell those who look at them. The dead are all pointing mutely to themselves. Their crosses are the direction-posts of new life.