The most enduring moment of Armistice Day will be the silence at eleven, the moment of communion. In America in many cities work ceased at eleven but every one was instructed to make the utmost noise possible. Thus a year ago at New Orleans the writer of these lines listened to an infernal din of train whistles, factory syrens, steam horns and hooters, clashing church-bells, roaring Klaxon-horns, hammering of anvils, squeaking of trumpets, and shouts of people. And the thought inevitably came--the West does not understand. It did not suffer as we did and came into a share in it all too late. Only the end of a small war can express itself in noise; the end of such an one as this in Europe was silence. And a fitting monument of silence is the Cenotaph, the empty tomb. England is very happy in the Cenotaph, much more happy than in the Edith Cavell statue, which leaves out the last words of the kind nurse, does not say "_Patriotism is not enough_," but writes "Brussels Dawn" instead, making her a kindler of anger against a foe rather than a salver of wounds. The impersonal cenotaph, without any Cross or weeping Christ, or rampant lions, without even the pronoun "our" which some wished to see upon it--"Our glorious dead," instead of "The glorious dead," can stand for all who laid down their lives baptised or unbaptised, white or coloured, friend or foe. For even Germans had to die that Europe might be free. So in leaving the fields of the dead and the beginning and the end of the war and Paris itself, you come naturally to the Cenotaph, the stone which gathers to itself all the experience and all that was sacred in the war--the altar at the summit of a thousand weary steps. It stands in the midst of England's great street of Government, 'twixt Nelson and the Abbey, and says to all who pass--"Go and do thou likewise." To all the selfish, "_We were not selfish_;" to the clamorous, "_We are silent, yet we speak_;" to the strident and ambitious, to the self-seekers and the cynical, to those who live as though there had been no sacrifice, to those who sneer at the ideal, "_We suffered and died that you might have your life, that all might have more life; we suffered and died for the good of the whole!_" When Millerand was elected President of France his supporters insisted always that they had found a man whose public life would be worthy of France _and of her dead_. France's ideal is that through the sacrifice of her sons France should become "greater yet." Our men did not die that England might become greater, but that Europe might be saved from tyranny and greed, and it is for us and our public men to see that their sacrifice shall never seem to grow barren.