r genius and
another epic style than those of Homer may be requisite fitly to
celebrate them, but the theme assuredly is not less lofty, the heroism
less heroic, the triumph or defeat less impressive.

Twice, and twice only, is man inevitably alone--in the hour of death
and the hour of his birth. Man, alone always, is then supremely alone.
In that final solitude what are pomp and circumstance to the heart?
That which strengthens a man then, whether on the battlefield or at the
stake or in life's unrecorded martyrdoms, is not the cry of present
onlookers nor the hope of remembering fame, but the faith for which he
has striven, or his conception of the purposes, the ends in which the
nation for which he is dying, lives and moves and has its being. Made
strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full
splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the
battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering
the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and
various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to
nature's day. And in the great hour, whatever his past hours have
been, consecrate to duty or to ease, to the loftiest or to the
least-erected aims, whether he is borne on triumphant to the dread
pause, the vigil which is the night after a battle, or falling he sinks
by a fatal touch, and the noise of victory is hushed in the coming of
the great silence, and the darkness swoons around him, and the cry
"Press on!" stirs no pulsation any longer--in that great hour he is
lifted to the heights of the highest, the prophet's rapt vision, the
poet's moment of serenest inspiration, or what else magnifies or makes
approximate to the Divine this mortal life of ours.

War thus greatened in character by its ideal, the phrase of the Greek
orator, let me repeat, is no longer an empty sound, but vibrates with
its original life--"How fortunate the dead who have fallen in battle!
And how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!"
An added solemnity invests the resolutions of senates, and the prayer
on the battlefield, "Through death to life," acquires a sincerity more
moving and a simplicity more heroic. And these, I imagine, will be the
results of Imperialism and of this deepening consciousness of its
destiny in Imperial Britain, whether in war which is the act of the
State as a whole, or in the career of the soldier which recei