great dawn in which we rejoiced.  We found him lying in a pool of water, among brown weeds in the dark shadow of the timberings.  You must not overrate the horrors of the former days; in those days it was scarcely more common to see death in England than it would be to-day.  This dead man was a sailor from the Rother Adler, the great German battleship that—­had we but known it—­lay not four miles away along the coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn and battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, all strong and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .

I remember that poor boy very vividly.  He had been drowned during the anaesthesia of the green gas, his fair young face was quiet and calm, but the skin of his chest had been crinkled by scalding water and his right arm was bent queerly back.  Even to this needless death and all its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had come.  Everything flowed together to significance as we stood there, I, the ill-clad, cheaply equipped proletarian, and Melmount in his great fur-trimmed coat—­he was hot with walking but he had not thought to remove it—­leaning upon the clumsy groins and pitying this poor victim of the war he had helped to make.  “Poor lad!” he said, “poor lad!  A child we blunderers sent to death!  Do look at the quiet beauty of that face, that body—­to be flung aside like this!”

(I remember that near this dead man’s hand a stranded star-fish writhed its slowly feeling limbs, struggling back toward the sea.  It left grooved traces in the sand.)

“There must be no more of this,” panted Melmount, leaning on my shoulder, “no more of this. . . .”

But most I recall Melmount as he talked a little later, sitting upon a great chalk boulder with the sunlight on his big, perspiration-dewed face.  He made his resolves.  “We must end war,” he said, in that full whisper of his; “it is stupidity.  With so many people able to read and think—­even as it is—­there is no need of anything of the sort.  Gods!  What have we rulers been at? . . .  Drowsing like people in a stifling room, too dull and sleepy and too base toward each other for any one to get up and open the window.  What haven’t we been at?”

A great powerful figure he sits there still in my memory, perplexed and astonished at himself and all things.  “We must change all this,” he repeated, and threw out his broad hands in a powerful gesture against the sea and sky.  “We have done so weakly—­Heaven alone knows why!” I can see him now, queer giant that he looked on that dawnlit beach of splendor, the sea birds flying about us and that crumpled death hard by, no bad symbol in his clumsiness and needless heat of the unawakened powers of the former time.  I remember it as an integral part of that picture that far away across the sandy stretches one of those white estate boards I have described, stuck up a little askew amidst the yellow-green turf upon the crest of the low cliffs.