In these years we women have lived always with the shadow of the war over us--it never leaves us, night or day. We do not live completely where we are in these days. A bit of us is always with our men on our many fields of war. We live partly in France and Flanders, in Italy, in the Balkans, in Egypt and Palestine and Mesopotamia, in Africa, with the lonely white crosses in Gallipoli, with our men who guard us sleeping and waking, going down to the sea in ships and under the sea, fighting death in submarines and mines, and with those who in the air are the eyes and the winged cavalry of our forces. We mourn our dead, not sadly and hopelessly, though life for many of us is emptier forever, and for many so much harder, and we wear very little mourning. We mourn silently, and with a sure faith that our men's supreme sacrifice is not in vain. "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend." The little white crosses of our graves symbolize the faith for which they die. The message of our soldier poets who have been created by this war and have written immortal verse, and many of whom have died, is the message of men who have seen through the veils of time into eternity, who are free of life and death, whom nothing can hurt, "if it be not the Destined Will." The veils of time grow thin in these days to those of us who take Death into our reckoning all the time. We think of our men gone on ahead as eternally young. "Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres. There is music in the midst of desolation And a glory that shines before our tears. * * * * * "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the Sun and in the morning We will remember them." We know, too, though we do not often define it, that the forces we women fight in the enemy are the forces that have left women out in world affairs. Germany is the Fatherland, never, it is significant, the Motherland as our little Islands are, and its mad dream of militarism and _Weltmacht_ is the dream of men who deny any constructive part to women in the great affairs of life. The hopes of all the democracies are bound up in this struggle and its issue, and there is no real place in the world for the true service and genius and work of women, any more than for that of the mass of men, save in democracy. We mean so much in these days by democracy. It seems to be indefinable in its larger meanings. It is not a system of government, but, on the other hand, no country can be called democratic that has not established political freedom, and no country is truly democratic in which such freedom is only in name, and its women are not included or a group rule or the demagogue and the worst kind of politician hold sway.