If I could only write it down as the Professor spoke, if I could only make you see his eyes glowing with little darts of flame as he saw the whole world transformed into a mighty workshop in which the "alchemy of Providence" is transmuting the soiled substance of our humanity into living souls (over whom death can have no dominion) fashioned for heavenly destinies—then you, too, would believe. Since that day my old friend has not spoken a word about the "waste of the flower of the race."
The house with the drawn blinds stands at the cross-roads, and I must come back to it. What is it that has happened to him who lies in a nameless grave in France? The opportunity for winning glory and earthly fame did not come his way; he just laid down his life along with hundreds of thousands more. He has taken his place among the undistinguished dead.
"O, undistinguished dead,
Whom the bent covers or the rock-strewn steep
Shows to the stars, for you I mourn—I weep,
O, undistinguished dead.
"None knows your name,
Blackened and blurred in the wild battle's brunt,
Hotly ye fell with all your wounds in front.
That was your fame."
Not a line in the records of time for him. But there are other records—those of eternity. He has lost nothing of the thrill of life. He is being borne on that tide of self-surrender and heroism which has flowed through the ages, and bears those who embark on it to the very feet of God. He would not himself have it otherwise. "It is better far to go out with honour than survive with shame," wrote a comrade from the trenches, now united with him in death. There is a place for sorrow in our land, but its place is by the hearth-stones of those whose sons choose to survive with shame. He has taken his place among those who, unseen, are leading on the embattled hosts of his race to victory. He has discovered the treasures in store for the brave and the true. When, amid the flutterings of flags and the shouting of the people rejoicing in their deliverance, the great army will return home at last—he, too, will come.
At Kobé, when the bugles were welcoming the victorious Japanese home in 1895, Lafcadio Hearn spoke to an old man of those who would never return. "Probably the Western people believe," answered the old man, "that the dead never return. There are no Japanese dead who do not return. There are none who do not know the way." It is a poor, emasculated religion that does not believe that. When at the last the bugles call in the quiet evening ... they will come back. They will come crowned with glory and honour and immortality—with that victory which overcometh the world. Let the blinds be rolled up, and the windows be all flung open to the light.