For nothing surely in the world can be so utterly and simply moving as the record of dead greatness--unless perhaps it be the oblivion which is the end of all greatness at the last. There is a place on the bleak top of the South Downs, a great tumulus, with an earth-work round it, all grassy now and tufted with gorse, the sheep grazing over it, which looks for miles north and east and west over the fertile weald, with shadowy hills on the horizon; and to the south, where the great ridges fold together, you can catch through the haze a golden glint of the sea. I never pass the place without a deep and strange thrill. It is called the Mound of the Seven Kings; it looks over a grassy space which is known as ‘Terrible Down,’ and of what day and what doom it is the record, who shall say? It seems impossible to us now, just as it seemed to the old hill-men who raised that tumulus, that as the world welters and widens onward, the great tragedies and losses and sacrifices which we have seen with our eyes, and the thought of which has so possessed our souls with a sense of grief and glory combined, should become but a tale that is told. But it is one of the thoughts which lie deepest and noblest in the mind and soul of man, the thought of old and infinite strife and endeavour, pain and death, courage and hope so richly blended, till it seems too great for the heart to hold. The mystery of it is that, as the Psalmist says: ‘I see that all things come to an end; but Thy commandment is exceeding broad.’ The thought, if I can define it, leaps like fire from crumbling ashes--all this great pageant of energy and heroism and fame fading farther and farther into the past--and yet, in spite of the hush of the tolling bell and the solemn music, the certainty that it is all worth doing and enduring, that we must wrest the great values out of life and make of it a noble thing; and that while memory fades and honour seems to perish, yet the seed once sown, it springs up again and again in life and beyond death, beyond all possibility of extinction. One of the things for which, in a great time like the present--great for all its sadness, and perhaps because of its sadness--one of the things for which I thank God is that this war has revealed as nothing else could have done the latent heroism of our nation. If only it could make us poets and cure us of being prophets! I have often been ashamed to the bottom of my heart of the cries of panic-mongers and crabbed pessimists shrieking in our ears that we were a nation sunk in sloth and luxury and indifference. I have lived all my life among the young, and if ever there was a thing of which I was certain, it was that our youth was brave and modest and manly--as this long and bitter fight has daily and hourly proved.