given for England, the blood so generously shed for her, the homes that
have sacrificed their all, our "golden lads" from all quarters and
classes, whose young bodies lie mingled with an alien dust that "is for
ever England," since they sleep there and hallow it; our mothers who mourn
the death or the wreck of the splendid sons they reared; our widowed wives
and fatherless children. And this, in a quarrel which only very slowly our
people have come to feel as in very deed their own. At first we thought
most often and most vividly of Belgium, of the broken treaty, and of
France, so wantonly attacked, whose people no English man or woman could
ever have looked in the face again, had we forsaken her. Then came the
hammer blows that forged our will--Louvain, Aerschot, Rheims, the
air-raids on our defenceless towns, the senseless murder of our women and
children, the Bryce report, the _Lusitania_, the execution of Edith
Cavell--the whole stupefying revelation of the German hatred and greed
towards this country, and of the qualities latent in the German character.
Now we _know_--that it is they, or we--since they willed it so. And this
old, illogical, unready country is only just arriving at its full
strength, only just fully conscious of the sternness of its own resolve,
only just putting out its full powers, as the German power is weakening,
and the omens are changing--both in East and West.


III

No!--the effort of England during the past eighteen months in spite of all
temporary ebbs and difficulties, in spite of that chorus of self-blame in
which the English nation delights, has been one of the great things in the
history of our country. We have "improvised the impossible" in every
direction--_but one_.