"And what are you looking for?"
"A place with no shells flying about, sir, to start a Y.M. centre!"
"Why, that's what everyone on the Peninsula is looking for!" exclaimed the Colonel. "If you can find it, by all means keep it!"
October 28th. All things considered, the resignation of the French Ministry is causing far less comment here than such a move in England would make, though in Paris we hear there is quite an upheaval. Internal politics in France are so entirely subservient to the international issues at stake.
One would not want those at home to know all there is to know of modern warfare—of the vast pestilential graveyard that is Belgium—yet one cannot help wishing that some of the vibrations of these strenuous times could be more clearly felt by them, that they would cease to see things as they wish to see them, and realise that the worst is yet to come—that we must brace ourselves to face it.
Not only the spirits of the fallen heroes of our little insignificant Western Front cry out to be avenged, not only the scarce human prisoners, dying in hundreds of cold and hunger in disease-ridden concentration camps; the girl mothers of Belgium, the murdered innocents, the crucified Canadians; men burned by liquid fire, suffocated by poison gas, parched men dying of thirst on the arid plains of the East; but every forbear of our gallant race warns us that the end is not yet, that to safeguard the future of our children the nation must turn its whole attention to the work in hand.
How can we blame the slackers who, for want of confidence, refused to throw in their lot with what seems to them a wild-goose chase—until fetched? We must blame the slothful system that allows one man to profit by another's patriotism.
We must not lay the blame of any one failure at the door of any one particular man, but attribute it to the fault we are most often apt to exalt as a virtue—as if by so doing we exonerated our mistakes—our slack unpreparedness.
Surely, until we are animated by one great unity of purpose, one great desire to sink personal in national interests, even as our dead heroes have done, there can be no end.