And the next land he found, it was bare and hilly ground Where once the bread-corn grew, But the fields were cankered and the water was defiled, And the trees were riven through; And there was neither paved highway, Nor secret path in the wood, But had borne its weight of the broken clay, And darkened 'neath the blood. (_Father and Mother they put aside, and the nearer love also-- An hundred thousand men who died, whose grave shall no man know._) And the last land he found, it was fair and level ground Above a carven Stone, And a stark Sword brooding on the bosom of the Cross Where high and low are one; And there was grass and the living trees, And the flowers of the Spring, And there lay gentlemen from out of all the seas That ever called him King. (_'Twixt Nieuport sands and the eastward lands where the Four Red Rivers spring Five hundred thousand gentlemen of those that served the King._) All that they had they gave--they gave-- In sure and single faith. There can no knowledge reach the grave To make them grudge their death Save only if they understood That, after all was done We they redeemed denied their blood, And mocked the gains it won. RUDYARD KIPLING. I: "_Our King went forth on pilgrimage._" It was our King's wish that he should go as a private pilgrim, with no trappings of state nor pomp of ceremony, and with only a small suite, to visit the tombs in Belgium and France of his comrades who gave up their lives in the Great War. In the uniform which they wore on service, he passed from one to another of the cemeteries which, in their noble simplicity, express perfectly the proud grief of the British race in their dead; and, at the end, within sight of the white cliffs of England, spoke his thoughts in a message of eloquence which moved all his Empire to sympathy.