g for him in England, and this German
lad whose young wife was weeping in his German home.

My God, why do men make wars?

THE COMING OF SPRING

But perhaps, as Zola says, it is only the soft-hearted philosophers who
are loud in their curses of war, and the truer wisdom was that of the
stoical ancients, who could look with indifference on the massacre of
millions. To keep manly, to remind ourselves that the generations come
and go, that after all people die, and that more die one year than
another--this should be the wise man's way of reconciling himself to the
inhumanities of war. It is horrible doctrine, but certainly nature seems
to speak with that voice, and hence the pang that came to us with the
next great flash as of lightning, which showed us the battle-front at
the beginning of the spring.

The long lines in the West had hardly changed so much as a single point
to north or south since October 1914. Yet what horrors of conflict
the intervening months had witnessed, bloody in their progress, though
barren in their results! The storms of the spring (which in much of
Northern Europe is only another name for a second winter) had gone
through it all. Our soldiers had suffered frightfully, and some of us at
home, awakening in the middle of stormy nights, had thought we heard the
booming of far-off guns under the thunder of the sky.

Three millions of men were dead by this time, and that belt of green
country, which many of us had crossed with light hearts a score of
times, was nothing now but a vast graveyard stretching from the foot of
the Swiss mountains to the margin of the North Sea. Here a charred and
blackened mass of stones, which had once been a group of houses; there a
cottage by the roadside, once sweet and pretty under its mantle of wild
roses, now hideous with a gaping hole torn in its walls, and its little
bed visible behind curtains that used to be white. And yet Nature was
going on the same as ever--hardly giving a hint that the Great Death had
passed that way. Our boys at the front wrote home that the leaves were
beginning to show on the trees, that the grass was growing again, and
that in the lulls of the cannonading they could hear the birds singing.

NATURE GOES HER OWN WAY

We found it heart-breaking. But it has been always so. I was in Naples
during the whole period of the last great eruption of Vesuvius, and,
looking through the gloom of the heavens, piled high with the whorls