God and no longer, the memory of the heroes of the Ypres salient will
live and glow.

'I hate war: that is why I am fighting,' said one of them. They fought
not merely for their country, but because they believed they were
fighting war itself. We shall not be true to their memory unless we
remember that. 'Slavery will always be,' said the defenders of slavery.
'It is impossible to prevent those things, human nature being what it
is,' said others of schools like Dotheboys Hall. A little time ago
England and Scotland were at one another's throats; a little before that
clan fell upon clan with vindictive fury. When we have beaten Germany,
who stands for the old, rotten, pagan belief in old, rotten, pagan
things we must see that we do not betray the men who died fighting
because they hated war.

But war has good in it too, they say. Yes, and amid its hideous wrong no
doubt there was good in slavery, as there is in cancer or blindness.
Almost any evil or agony may be the root of noble qualities, and war is
no exception.

These men died in the hope that it might be impossible for a civilised
nation again to thrust this evil on the human race. They died trusting
us to see that Europe would not again have to choose the alternative of
entering upon such an agony or of forgetting its honour towards God.
Force, it would seem, must long remain the last remedy, but might it not
be force resting on a pivot and striking with effect wherever
international crime seeks to disturb the peace of the nations? The mere
knowledge of such a united determination would at least be a powerful
persuasive. That may be only a dream. The immediate fact is that the
doctrine of Will to Power must first be crushed, represented as it is