Pledges of faith, divinely fair,
From peaceful worlds above
Against the onslaught of despair
They hold the fort of love.
[Illustration:
THE CIVILIAN AND THE WAR OFFICE
I am bidden to the War Office.
I depart for it.
I approach it.
I enter.
I am not observed.
I am still not observed.
I am observed.
I am spoken to (and still live).
I continue to be spoken to.
I am spoken to quite nicely.
I am shaken hands with.
I take my leave.]
_February, 1918_.
"Watchman, what of the night?" The hours pass amid the clash of rumours and
discordant voices--optimist, pessimist, pacificist. Only in the answer of
the fighting man, who knows and says little, but is ready for anything, do
we find the best remedy for impatience and misgiving:
"Soldier, what of the night?"
"Vainly ye question of me;
I know not, I hear not nor see;
The voice of the prophet is dumb
Here in the heart of the fight.
I count the hours on their way;
I know not when morning shall come;
Enough that I work for the day."
The first Brest-Litovsk Treaty has been signed, followed in nine days by
the German invasion of Russia, an apt comment on what an English paper, by
a misprint which is really an inspiration, calls "the Brest Nogotiations."
The record of the Bolshevist regime is already deeply stained with the
massacre of the innocents, but Lenin and Trotsky can plead an august
example.
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