as it is hideous. Not a day passed
during more than four terrible years, but what we read with tingling
hearts how brave men suffered without complaint, and died without fear,
for the countries that they loved. I remember, for example, reading on
a certain day in 1916, in a single copy of an evening newspaper, of
three young soldiers who were heroes. One was a German lad, unnamed, who
was found stricken unto death by the side of a dead Englishman, whose
wounds he had tried to staunch, and whose thirst he had quenched from
the water of his own canteen--a second Sir Philip Sidney, nobler than
the first, since he gave succor not to a friend but to an enemy. The
second man was an Englishman, Capt. Alexander Seaton, who fell fighting
bravely at the Dardanelles. A classical scholar of repute, a fellow in
Pembroke College, Cambridge, devoted to his work as a tutor and lecturer
in history, it was written of him, by one who knew and loved him, "Not a
soldier by inclination, he left his peaceful life at Pembroke solely
because he conceived that his duty lay that way, and that the hour had
come for every man to strike a blow for his country." The third man was
a Frenchman, a poet, Ernest Psichari by name, who fell at Verton, in
Belgium. "His battery had been ordered to keep the enemy in check while
the army was falling back," ran the story. "They were expected to hold
their ground for a few hours, and they did so for a whole day; and when
the last shell had been spent, officers and gunners were killed to a man
on the guns they had taken care to render unusable."

Such are the stories which came to us through the period of the Great
War. All of them are eloquent of the fact, are they not, that the
instinct of humanity is right in its ascription of heroism to the
soldier? If this instinct has gone astray, it is only in the tendency
which it has shown to ascribe heroism exclusively to the soldier. In
attempting to do full justice to the man who has fought and died amid
the terrors of the battlefield, it has been tempted again and again to
do something less than justice to the man who has fought and died as
gallantly in fields less dramatic but no less terrible than those of
war. For whether we judge heroism as involving contempt of comfort,
hazard of death, or the simple eager quest for fullness of life, we find
it, I believe, even more truly, though less frequently, characteristic
of the circumstances of peace than those of war. It w