I see the preacher in the pulpit. I hear him tell our soldiers the majestic story. They have won a great victory, not merely over human enemies (who may have thought they were doing right and were therefore all the more wrong), but over the powers of darkness which have been using our fellow men to destroy the living soul of humanity. For this reason God in His wisdom has permitted the miseries and calamities of war, that as once by flood so now by fire the world may be purged of its impurities. The earth sleeps full of the dead who have died to win this conflict. Over the tranquil graves of the millions who fell on former battlefields (Wagram, Waterloo, Sedan, Metz), other millions have fought and fallen and been trampled into the ground. In the drifting shadows of the North Sea, which has swallowed up through centuries of storm our bravest and best, mighty warships, which we believed to be invincible—amid the roll of smoke and the roar of flame, like creatures cut across the throat, and
