No. I
There came from Australia at his own expense, one Thomas Harper, an old man of seventy-four, to help in a British munition factory. He laboured hard, doing the work of two men, and more than once fainted with fatigue, but refused to go home because he “couldn’t rest while he thought his country needed shells.”
No. II
There is a certain small fishing village whose men were nearly all employed in fishing for mines. But there dawned a black day when news came that forty of their number had perished together and in the same hour. Now surely one would think that this little village, plunged in grief for the loss of its young manhood, had done its duty to the uttermost for Britain and their fellows! But these heroic fisher-folk thought otherwise, for immediately fifty of the remaining seventy-five men (all over military age) volunteered and sailed away to fill the places of their dead sons and brothers.
No. III
Glancing idly through a local magazine some days since, my eye was arrested by this:
“In proud and loving memory of our loved and loving son ... who fell in France ... with his only brother, ‘On Higher Service.’ There is no death.”
Thus then I conclude my list of facts and figures, a record of achievement such as this world has never known before, a record to be proud of, because it is the outward and visible sign of a people strong, virile, abounding in energy, but above all, a people clean of soul to whom Right and Justice are worth fighting for, suffering for, labouring for. It is the sign of a people which is willing to endure much for its ideals that the world may be a better world, wherein those who shall come hereafter may reap, in peace and contentment, the harvest this generation has sowed in sorrow, anguish and great travail.