The silence wrought in wood and stone
    Whose aisles our fathers trod;
  The pines that stand apart, alone,
    Like sentinels of God.

  With generous hands they paid the price,
    Unconscious of the cost,
  But we must gauge the sacrifice
    By all that they have lost.

  The joy of young adventurous ways,
    Of keen and undimmed sight,
  The eager tramp through sunny days,
    The dreamless sleep of night,

  The happy hours that come and go,
    In youth’s untiring quest,
  They gave, because they willed it so,
    With some light-hearted jest.

  No lavish love of future years,
    No passionate regret,
  No gift of sacrifice or tears
    Can ever pay the debt.

Yet if ever you try to express this indebtedness to the wonderful young men who survive, they turn the whole thing into a jest and tell you, for example, that only two things really interest them, “Europe and their stomachs”—­nothing in between matters.

[Illustration:  PAT (examining fare):  “May the divil destroy the Germans!”

SUB:  “Well, they don’t do you much harm, anyway.  You don’t get near enough to ’em.”

PAT:  “Do they not, thin?  Have they not kilt all the half-crown officers and left nothing but the shillin’ ones?”]

Guy Fawkes Day has come and gone without fireworks, pursuant to the Defence of the Realm Act.  Even Parliament omitted to sit.  Apropos of Secret Sessions, Lord Northcliffe has been accused of having had one all to himself and some five hundred other gentlemen at a club luncheon.  The Daily Mail describes the debate on the subject as a “gross waste of time,” which seems to come perilously near lese-majeste! But then, as a writer in the Evening News—­another Northcliffe paper—­safely observes, “It is the failing of many people to say what they think without thinking.”

December, 1916.

Rumania has unhappily given Germany the chance of a cheap and spectacular triumph—­of which, after being badly pounded on the Somme, she was sorely in need.  Here was a comparatively small nation, whom the Germans could crush under their heel as they had crushed Belgium and Serbia.  So in Rumania they concentrated all the men they could spare from other fronts and put them under their best generals.  Their first plans were thwarted, but eventually the big guns had their way and Bukarest fell.  Then, after the usual display of bunting and joy-bells in Berlin, was the moment to make a noble offer of peace.  The German peace overtures remind one of Mr. Punch’s correspondents of the American advertisement:  “If John Robinson, with whose wife I eloped six months ago, will take her back, all will be forgiven.”

The shadowy proposals of those who preach humanity while they practise unrestricted frightfulness have not deceived the Allies.  They know, and have let the enemy know, that they must go on until they have made sure of an enduring peace by reducing the Central Empires to impotence for evil.