The Cross has interpreted life to the soldier and has provided him with the only acceptable philosophy of the war. It has taught boys just entering upon life’s experience that, out-topping all history and standing out against the background of all human life, is a Cross on which died the Son of God. It has made the hill of Calvary stand out above all other hills in history. Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon--these may stand at the foot of the hill, as did the Roman soldiers, but they are made to look mean and insignificant as the Cross rises above them, showing forth the figure of the Son of Man. Against the sky-line of human history the Cross stands clearly, and all else is in shadow. The wayside crosses at the Front and the flashes of roaring guns may not have taught our soldiers much history, but they have taught them the central fact of history; and all else will have to accommodate itself to that, or be disbelieved. The Cross of Christ is the center of the picture for evermore, and the grouping of all other figures must be round it. To the soldiers it can never again be made a detail in some other picture. Seen also in the light of their personal experience it has taught them that as a cross lies at the basis of the world’s life and shows bare at every crisis of national and international life so, at the root of all individual life, is a cross. They have been taught to look for it at every parting of the ways. Suffering to redeem others and make others happy will now be seen as the true aim of life and not the grasping of personal pleasure or profit. They have stood where high explosive shells thresh out the corn from the chaff--the true from the false. They have seen facts in a light that lays things stark and bare; and the cant talked by skeptical armchair-philosophers will move them as little as the chittering of sparrows on the housetops. For three long years our front-line trenches have run through what was once a village called Neuve Chapelle. There is nothing left of it now. But there is something there which is tremendously impressive. It is a crucifix. It stands out above everything, for the land is quite flat around it. The cross is immediately behind our firing trench, and within two or three hundred yards of the German front trench. The figure of Christ is looking across the waste of No Man’s Land. Under His right arm and under His left, are British soldiers holding the line. Two dud shells lie at the the foot. One is even touching the wood, but though hundreds of shells must have swept by it, and millions of machine-gun bullets, it remains undamaged. Trenches form a labyrinth all round it. When our men awake and "stand-to" at dawn the first sight they see is the cross; and when at night they lie down in the side of the trench, or turn into their dug-outs, their last sight is the cross. It stands clear in the noon-day sun; and in the moonlight it takes on a solemn grandeur.