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Updated: May 23, 2025
It is easy for the boys of Brittany to die, those sailors with a rifle, the stanch Fusiliers Marins, who, outnumbered, held fast at Melle and Dixmude, and for twelve months made Nieuport, the extreme end of the western battle-line, a great rock. It is easy, because there is a glory in the eyes of boys. But the older man lives with second thoughts, with a subdued philosophy, a love of security.
Meantime, Jondo at the front of his men charged into the very center of the savage battle-line as, furious for blood, they threshed across the narrow draw the disciplined arm and courageous heart against a blood-thirsty foe.
It is the big facts that matter: the steady growth of British resources, in men and munitions, toward a maximum which we and Russia are only approaching, while that of the Central Empires is past; the deepening unity of an Empire which is being forged anew by danger and trial, and by the spirit of its sons all over the world a unity against which the Irish outrage, paid for by German money, disavowed by all that is truly Ireland, Unionist or Nationalist, and instantly effaced, as a mere demonstration, by the gallantry at the same moment of Irish soldiers in the battle-line lifts its treacherous hand in vain; the increasing and terrible pressure of the British blockade of Germany, equivalent, as some one has lately said, every twenty-four hours that it is maintained, to a successful action in the field; the magnificent resistance of an indomitable France; the mounting strength of a reorganised Russia.
There was a war-ship waiting below not the biggest by a good deal in our fleet, but big enough to have hope one day of firing her broadside on the battle-line. But the great duty of a war-ship is to be immediately useful. She was there, and smaller war-ships with her, to see that the troop-ships got protection on the run across.
The entire process of training was a compromise between speed and efficiency. During the latter months of the war many of the American troops were put on the battle-line when they were by no means sufficiently trained.
It is obvious therefore that the influence of Barneveld, hitherto so all- controlling in the States-General, and which rested on the complete submission of the States of Holland to his will, was tottering. The battle-line between Church and State was now drawn up; and it was at the same time a battle between the union and the principles of state sovereignty.
If the whole battle-line moved forward the German fire would have been dispersed, but in these separate attacks on places like Trones Wood and Delville Wood, and later on High Wood, it was a vast concentration of explosives which plowed up our men.
Below you, like a vast tessellated floor, is the Friulian plain, dotted with red-roofed villages, checkerboarded with fields of green and brown, stretching away, away to where, beyond the blue Isonzo, the Julian and Carnic Alps leap skyward in a mighty, curving, mile-high wall. You have the war before you, for amid those distant mountains snakes the Austro-Italian battle-line.
The first onrush of the Germans in 1914 did some damage locally; after that the battle-line in Belgium did not sway backwards and forwards, as in France, over a deep belt of country. It was practically stationary, and hostilities were confined to a small corner of the country, much of which in recent times was backward, poor, and sleepy, and did not include the active industry of the country.
This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The lesson of history and comparative religion could not be more perfectly summarised. The sovereignty of conscience could not be more masterfully asserted. Of old we learned that man was "made in the image of God," but now we see that the God of our fathers, known of old Lord of our far-flung battle-line
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