“’All men and all nations are the better for remembering that once they were holy.  England’s past, then, is holy; her future is unwritten.  But Idealism is mightily abroad among those who shall make the England that is to be.  And all that remains for the preacher to say is this:  Nothing but Christianity will ever gather in that harvest of spiritual ideals which alone will make good our prodigal outlay; for, after all, we have sown the world with the broken dreams and spilled ambitions of a generation of schoolboys....

     “’All you who have suffered, you fathers and mothers, remember
     this:  only by turning your sufferings into the seeds of
     God-like things will you make their memory beautiful.’

“Oh, Rupert, I was elevated by all he said, and I prayed that you might go on with willingness and resolution to the end, and that I might face the last few weeks of the war with courage.  I thought of the remark of your old Cheshire Colonel, that, instead of wandering during these years among the undistinguished valleys, you have been transferred straight to the mountain-tops.  Do you remember how I used to call you ’my mountain boy’?  The name has a new meaning now.  Even if you are in danger at this time, I try to be proud.  I think of you as on white heights.”

Sec.3

“Only by turning your sufferings into the seeds of God-like things will you make their memory beautiful.”

As I copied just now those last words of Monty’s sermon, I laid down my pencil on the dug-out floor with a little start.  As in a flashlight I saw their truth.  They created in my mind the picture of that AEgean evening, when Monty turned the moment of Doe’s death, which so nearly brought me discouragement and debasement, into an ennobling memory.  And I foresaw him going about healing the sores of this war with the same priestly hand.

Yes, there are reasons why such wistful visions should haunt me now.  Everything this evening has gone to produce a certain exaltation in me.  First, there has been the bombardment, with its thought of going over the top to-morrow.  Then comes my mother’s glowing letter, which somehow has held me enthralled, so that I find sentences from it reiterating themselves in my mind, just as they did in the old schooldays.  And lastly, there has been the joyous sense of having completed my book, on which for three years I have laboured lovingly in tent, and billet, and trench.

I meant to close it on the last echo of Monty’s sermon.  But the fascination was on me, and I felt I wanted to go on writing.  I had so lost myself in the old scenes of schoolroom, playing-fields, starlit decks, and Grecian battlegrounds, which I had been describing, that I actually ceased to hear the bombardment.  And the atmosphere of the well-loved places and well-loved friends remained all about me.  It was the atmosphere that old portraits and fading old letters throw around those who turn them over.  So I took up again my pencil and my paper.