In a moment the veiled windows flashed their meaning. In the long lists of the dead I found the name I looked for. I had schooled myself to look at these lists, thinking of them in the mass as force or power; but that one name insisted on its individuality. They were all individual lives, each throbbing with intensest self-realisation, each with his love and hope and fear. There was none among them so poor but some heart clung to them. They may die, no longer in units, but in broad swathes, mown down by machine guns, but they are individual hearts still. In masses the sea swallows them up, trenches are filled with them, but however much we try we cannot narcotise our hearts by sophistries. Some day a name stands out alone--and we realise. All over the land, in every parish, blinds are being drawn in houses where music and laughter are silenced. There comes the surge of a wild revolt. It is not these individual hearts alone that lie stricken, it is the joy of the centuries yet to be. In nameless graves lie the dream-children who will never now be born. This criminal sealing up of the very fountain of life--how can we bear it? And yet we open not our mouths in protest. Is it because we are losing our sensitiveness--becoming brutalised? It might be that. For nothing coarsens the mind like that tide of hatred and passion which war sends sweeping through the hearts of men. And yet it is not that. For when they told the mother, breaking it gently as love alone can do, that her son was dead, she bowed her head in silence, yielding herself to the solace of tears; but in a little while she said brokenly: "It is good to die so: I would not have my son shelter himself behind other mothers' sons." No, it is not because we are already coarsened that the heart can bear. It is rather because we have realised with the passing away of the old world of the last long summer days (it seems already centuries remote) that there are some things so great that they can transfigure even death. When the loyalty to the highest can only be fulfilled through death, we acquiesce in the sacrifice. In our parish we have not been coarsened--we have been quickened. *** It seems as if it were in another era that my friend at the top of the Gallows' Road proved to me convincingly that death alone was king. With a keen irony he depicted this little globule of a world, a third-rate satellite of a fifth-rate star, floating in the abysses, in relation to the universe but as a mere grain of sand amid all the sand on the world's shores; and on that puny speck of a world he pictured the ephemeral generations, mere flashes of troubled consciousness--and then darkness.