Now, where the battle has rolled back, it is the turn of the dead. They lie in the midst of life, and the living can never forget them. The last time that I stood by one of these resting-places, covered already with green grass, it was an autumn evening, cold and dreary. We were on ground from which the enemy had been driven back with huge slaughter on both sides. Almost as far as one could see the face of nature was hideously scarred with an intricate network of saps and trenches. What had once been happy homes were piles of brown rubble and gaping walls and spires. What had once been green woods were stiff rows of shattered leafless stumps. It was a flat country, but in front, a little further on, there was a ragged man-made dune, thirty or forty feet high and ten times as long, enclosing a deep crater in which were lying hundreds of mangled bodies, some of them with their limbs sticking through the surface, killed and buried or half buried by the same appalling explosion in one dreadful moment of eternity. Far beyond, but not so far that it was out of range of the guns, the horizon, where the enemy lay concealed, loomed up grim and threatening against the evening sky. To me the horizon on the Lorraine frontier, seen from far off, always had that dark and ominous look. The vague and dreamlike mystery of what lay beyond that silent line of low dark hills, the thought of the preparations that might be going on behind it, the feeling that no Frenchman or Englishman could go up to it and live, and most of all, I think, the knowledge that across the road on which one stood, and all the other roads and railways that once were thoroughfares between the two countries for all the world to use, a line was now drawn which no man might pass, always seemed to make of the frontier a dreadful symbol of the war and its menace of evil to come. Close at hand it is different. When you reach the impassable line of the furthest trench or the tall barrier of sandbags on the other side of which the enemy, in the same trench, is lying behind a similar barrier twenty yards away, the sense of mystery and foreboding melts away. There is no cure for a fit of the blues like a visit to the front. For after all, the line is not impassable. It has been crossed and pushed back before, and it will be crossed and pushed back again. All along it, where you had let yourself think there was only the foe, there is an underground world swarming with French soldiers, watching and fighting, or ready to fight, day and night, up to any move that the enemy may attempt to make, and sworn and resolved for France and freedom to push on to the end. And that is the view that all of us have got to take when the horror of the war and its limitless and frowning horizon is upon us. We must get right up to our difficulties and meet them face to face. We must work and watch and pray, like the men in the trenches—for they do pray in the trenches—and leave the rest to God.