the shadows of the soldiery, vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men.  It was as though the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the light west wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years of combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of the year over the endless plains.

“But there was no voice and no order.  The terrible tramp of the Guard, and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the army was of ghosts and was defeated.  They passed in the silence which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they sleep in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords.”

Time and circumstances have changed our ancient enemies into our honoured friends, and the race that fought against us at Waterloo has cemented its friendship towards us with its blood; and as we look back over the century that divides us from Waterloo we can now with Mr. Belloc salute the sombre figure of the defeated conqueror.

Your loving old
G.P.

34

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I will now quote to you one other master of splendid English.

Not every temporal sovereign of these realms has deserved a throne among the kings of literature.  James the First was a poet of some merit; Charles the First wrote and spoke with a fine distinction; Queen Victoria’s letters to her subjects were models of dignified and kindly simplicity; but to King George the Fifth by the grace of God it has been reserved to give utterance to what I believe to be the most noble and uplifting address ever delivered by a king to his people.

From the day of his accession King George has been confronted with trials and troubles enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and none of us can plumb the depth of anguish that must have been his through the awful years of the Great War.  He has been tried and proved in the fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged ennobled by pain, and dowered by sorrow with a gift of expression that has placed him among the masters of the glory of English prose.

On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a tour of the cemeteries in France at Terlinchthun, where there stands on the cliffs over-looking the Channel a monument to Napoleon and his Grand Army, and around it now lie the innumerable English dead.

Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and Lord Haig had in his presence clasped hands, and the King with a fine gesture had placed his own right hand upon their clasped ones and said, “Amis toujours!” We are told that, “going up to the Cross of Sacrifice, the King looked out over the closely marshalled graves to the sea, and back towards the woods and fields of the Canche Valley where Montreuil stands, and seemed reluctant to leave.”

At last he turned, and, standing before the great Cross of Sacrifice, he spoke from his heart words that those of us, Antony, who love our country and the glory of its language will cherish while we live:—­