For true it is that at the Base they study loving-kindness, and chaplains and doctors and nurses are busy with delicate ministries seeking to cure, to assuage, and to console.  Alas! on what tragic errands do so many come and go; parents like Joseph and Mary seeking their child, and wives their husbands, in hope, in fear, in joy, in anguish, too often finding that the bright spirit has returned to God Who gave it, and that nothing is left but to follow him behind the bier draped with the Union Jack to the little cemetery on the hill....  But for one that is buried here a thousand lie where they fell.  Those stricken fields of Flanders! nevermore will they be for us the scene of an idle holiday; they will be a place of pilgrimage and a shrine of prayer.  I well remember—­I can never forget—­a journey I made in the company of a French staff officer over the country that lies between Paris and the river Aisne.  We came out on a wide rolling plain, and in the waning light of a winter’s day we suddenly saw among the stubble and between the oat-ricks, far as the eye could reach, thousands of little tricolour flags fluttering in the breeze.  By each flag was a wooden cross.  By each cross was a soldier’s kepi, and sometimes a coat, bleached by the sun and rain.  Instinctively we bared our heads, and as we walked from one grave to another I could hear the orderly behind us muttering words of prayer.  That lonely oratory was the battlefield of the Marne.  Seasons will come and go, man will plough and sow, the earth will yield her increase, but those graves will never be disturbed by share or sickle.  They are holy ground.

So it is with the fields of Flanders.  In those fields our gallant dead lie where they fell, and where they lie the earth is dedicated to them for ever.  Of the British Expeditionary Force that landed in France in August 1914 perhaps not 10 per cent remain.  Like the dead heroes whose ghostly voices whispered in the ears of L’Aiglon on the field of Wagram, they haunt the plains of France.  But their voices are the voices of exhortation, and their breath and finer spirit have passed into the drafts that have taken their place.  Their successors greet Death like a friend and go into battle as to a festival, counting no price—­youth, health, life—­too high to pay for the country of their birth and their devotion.  The nation that can nurture men such as these can calmly meet her enemy in the gate.  Verily she shall not pass away.

* * * * *

The moon was at the full as I climbed the down where the shepherd was guarding his flock behind the hurdles on the short turf and creeping cinque-foil.  Far below, whence you could faintly catch the altercation of the pebbles on the beach under the importunities of the tide, I saw an oily sea heaving like shot silk in the moonlight, the lonely beacon was winking across the waste of waters, strange signals were flashing from the pier, and merchantmen were coming up Channel