ut even out of that maelstrom of horror there had been
glimpses of great things--great heroisms, great victories, and great
proofs of the power to endure. A rigid censorship, rightly designed to
keep back from the enemy the information that would endanger the lives
of our soldiers, was also keeping us in ignorance of many glorious
incidents of the war such as would have thrilled us up to our throbbing
throat. But some of them could not possibly be concealed, so we heard of
the gallant stand of the dauntless sons of our daughter Canada, and we
saw our great old warrior, Lord Roberts, going out to the front in his
eighty-third year to visit his beloved Indian troops, dying as was
most fit on the battlefield, within sound of the guns in the war he had
foretold, and then being brought home, borne through the crowded streets
of London and buried under the dome of St. Paul's, amid the homage of
his Bang and people.

THE COMING OF WINTER

Then, as the year deepened towards winter, the rains came, torrential
rains such as we thought we had never known the like of before. We
heard that the trenches were flooded, and that our soldiers were eating,
sleeping, and fighting ankle-deep (sometimes knee-deep) in water. At
night, on going to our white beds at home, we had remorseful visions of
those slimy red ruts in Flanders where our boys were lying out in the
drenching rain under the heavy darkness of the sky. It was hard to
believe that human strength could sustain itself against such cruel
conditions, and indeed it often failed.

Towards Christmas tens of thousands of our men had to be brought home
to our hospitals, many of them wounded, but not a few suffering from
maladies which made them unfit for military service. The accident of
being asked to distribute presents enabled me to see and talk
with hundreds of them. It was a sweet and exhilarating yet rather
nerve-racking experience. These young fellows, who had looked on death
in its most horrible aspects, having had it for their duty to kill as
many Germans as possible, and then to eat and sleep as if nothing had
occurred--had they been degraded, brutalized, lowered in the scale of
human creatures by their awful ordeal?

The sequel surprised me. The veil of mist with which a London winter
enshrouds the beginnings of night and day had only just risen when on
Christmas morning I reached the wounded soldiers' ward in the first of
the hospitals I visited. The sweet place wa