any of their fellows would have done in the same opportunity. Thus, having laid down their lives for the cause that commanded their faith and loyalty, they found their real lives--larger, more beautiful, stronger.... Not once, but many thousands of times, has this miracle happened! Their graves are strewn, singly and in groups, over every field of eastern France. They paid the debt, did their part little or great, unknown or glorified by men. Literally they have given their blood for the soil of their fathers' land. * * * * * We know that they have given much more than their blood to that soil. Just as at the call to arms, the selfish, the mean, the vicious qualities of these lives dropped from them in the freedom of sacrifice accepted, and in place of egotistic preoccupations rose once more to the surface of their natures the ancient virtues of their race, so in their going they left for the others who lived, who were to be born, a tremendous legacy of honor and noble responsibility. By watering the soil with their blood they have made it infinitely more precious for every human being that treads upon it. They have helped to make mere life more significant for those who remain to mourn them. It can never again be quite the same commonplace affair, so lightly, cheaply spent, as it had been before. They have not left behind them joy, but faith. And that is why the faces of the earnest living who are able to realize this sacrifice of youth have a grave sternness in them which touches even the most careless stranger. Something of the glory created by the dead and the wounded radiates out even to us in a distant, peaceful land.... But why, we ask, all this sacrifice, this cruel, agonizing sacrifice of war? That is a mystery too deep for any to fathom. It is better not to probe too insistently, to accept it as the man in Rheims,--"It must be better for the others afterward because of what we have endured." That is the expression of faith in life which is the better part of any religion. For what we suffer now, for what we give now of our most precious, it will be repaid to those who are to come. Life will be freer, grander, more significant: it will be a better world. Nobody who has seen or felt the heavy tragedy of this world war could endure its horror if he were not sustained by that faith. But with that faith the losses seem not too vast. One by one the world's great decisions must be made, in suffering, in blood and tears. Peace comes not through evasion or compromise, either for the individual or for the state.