Edith Cavell’s name is another that shines upon our roll of honour—­the same serene great spirit—­no thought of self, but only a great love and desire to serve—­and a great fearlessness.  Her message, before she went out alone at dawn to her death, which added another stain to the enemy’s pages dark with blood, was the message of one who saw the eternal verities, the things worth living and dying for.

Our men’s Roll of Honor is a heavy Roll.  We have lost in killed and permanently out of the army, a million men and over 75 per cent of our casualties are our own Island losses.  Our women in every village and in every city street have lost husbands, fathers, brothers, lovers and friends.  From every rank of life our men have died, the agricultural labourer, the city clerk, the railway man, the miner, the engineer, the business man, the poet, the journalist, the author, the artist, the scientist, the heirs of great names, many of the most brilliant of our young men.  We comb out our mines and shipyards, and factories, ceaselessly for more men.  Our boys at eighteen go into the army.  From eighteen to forty-one every man is liable for service.  Our Universities have only a handful of men in them and these are the disabled, the unfit, and men from other countries.  Oxford and Cambridge Colleges are full of Officers’ Training Corps men.  The Examination Schools and the Town Hall at Oxford are Hospitals, and Oxford and Cambridge streets are full of the blue-clad wounded, as are so many of our cities.  We are a nation at war, and at war for over three years and everywhere and in everything we are changed.

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.