me, but when I looked around both were gone. A shell landed just at the side of me, and I think Hugh and Bill were blown to pieces. I got my wound in the chest and the fragment came out through my back. I thought my last day had come. I dropped into a hole, and no sooner had I got in, than Mack got it through the face. He was able to go back, but I was simply helpless, as my legs refused to move. Anyhow, I pulled the shovel off my back and dug a little ridge in the side of the trench. No sooner had I done this than Fritz started to bombard. One shell fell in the hole in which I was, but exploded in the opposite direction. Then another came and landed just above my head, but it failed to go off. Had it gone off I never would have been here now. I had prayed hard to my God to deliver me from my enemies and when those things happened I felt my prayer was heard and that I was going to come through. I was there in that hole all day and the next night before anyone came near me. At last one of the 19th Battalion chaps came along and went for a stretcher for me."

Such are the varying impressions which a battle makes upon various men. It is no romance, but a grim reality of life and death. Far into the night we lie awake and ask ourselves, what is the meaning of it all?

At first on the field of battle one thrills at the sound of mighty and unearthly forces loosed, but in the din we suddenly realize that boys are dying all about us, and that these guns bear swift death and mangling to suffering men. Between us and the enemy are just a few deep shell holes and a thin red line of flesh and blood, as a human rampart, formed of men who hold their lives in their hands, ready to make the great sacrifice. Behind us are the hidden guns and the support trenches in the narrow strip of hard-won territory. Behind these are the moving columns on the long roads, the pulsing arteries of traffic, and the moving troop trains on the rails. Behind these in turn are the plying ships, the millions of toiling workers, and the suffering hearts of the nations in arms. Whole nations—yes, almost the whole of humanity—are organized for war and dragged into deadly conflict as by some devil's behest, instead of being organized for brotherhood and the building of a better world. Oh, not for this devil's work were men made. Surely mankind must come to its own in these birth pangs of a new era. Never, never again must a whole humanity of the free-born sons of God be dragged into the hell of war to sate the pride or pomp of kings, or to glut the ambition of scheming secret groups who have taught men that they are created as obedient slaves.

Far behind us, marking the slow advance up this ridge of death, are the sheltered cemeteries of white crosses that tell the price that has already been paid. There are five thousand crowded graves in yonder acre alone. Great is the price, awful in its solid weight of agony. This is no longer a war between two peoples, but between two principles; it is as much to free the German people as to protect ourselves. It is not for this narrow strip of hard-won soil, but for every foot of a world that from henceforth must be free. The men who are fighting on grounds of moral principle would rather pay any price than lie at ease under the false shadow of militarism, materialism, and grasping greed. These men are fighting, and many of them know that they are fighting, for a new world. Not only military oppression, but industrial oppression, must go. Not only German militarism, and Russian autocracy, and Turkish cruelty must be done away; but American materialism must be purged in the fiery furnace of this war. Its purposes will reach far beyond our ken, and though man's sin alone has caused the war, its issues are in the hands of God. The whole war has been a demonstration of the result of leaving God out of His world. The world with God left out leaves war; and life with God left out leaves hell.

There must be a turning to God in our own national life. We speak of the menace of German militarism, but what is militarism but armed and aggressive materialism, the deeper principle which lies behind it? And what is materialism but organized selfishness? Materialism and selfishness are the dangers of our own land as well as of Germany. And the war is a call to set our own house in order.

America can no longer live to herself alone. She is fighting for the freedom of humanity. Here on the very field of battle, at the throbbing heart of the conflict, we ask ourselves, What is the real issue of the war? What are they fighting for?

Away there in Austria a young crown prince, Francis Ferdinand, was murdered. It was the spark which set off the powder mine of Europe. But not for him are they fighting. Behind him stood the two contending forces of the growing nationalism of Serbia and the expanding commercialism of Austria. These two forces clashed in conflict, but not for them are they fighting. Behind these stood two greater powers, those of pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism, a growing Germany and a rising Russia, which like a vast glacier for a thousand years had sought the open sea. The ambitions of these two powers clashed in conflict at Constantinople and elsewhere. But not for them are they fighting.

On the western front there were two deeper principles in conflict, those of autocracy and democracy, the question whether one man and a sinister, hidden group of plotting militarists could drag the whole world into war and crush its liberties and its laws beneath the iron heel of despotism, or whether man as man should stand erect in his God-given right of freedom and work out his own destiny in friendly brotherhood.

But behind even the great conflict between autocracy and democracy lay a yet deeper issue. In the last analysis the final question in human life is between a material and a spiritual interpretation of the universe, whether might makes right and the strong are to rule, or whether right makes might and the moral order is supreme. There is a material and a spiritual side of life. On this side is the brute struggle for life; on that, the struggle for the life of others; on the one hand, the fight for the survival of the fittest, and on the other, the fight to make men fit to survive. On the left hand is selfishness and on the right service; on the one side are the red battlefields of the enemy, and on the other is a cross red in sacrifice of a life laid down in the serving and saving of men. There is a final issue in the world between passion and principle, between wrong and right, between darkness and light, between mammon and God, between self and Christ.

This ultimate issue must be faced by individuals and by nations. It is the challenge which confronts men in this war. Seventy years ago a crushed Europe faced the issue in the prophetic words of Mazzini, written in the hour of darkness and defeat:

"Our victory is certain; I declare it with the profoundest conviction, here in exile, and precisely when monarchical reaction appears most insolently secure. What matters the triumph of an hour? What matters it that by concentrating all your means of action, availing yourselves of every artifice, turning to your account those prejudices and jealousies of race which yet for a while endure, and spreading distrust, egotism, and corruption, you have repulsed our forces and restored the former order of things? Can you restore men's faith in it, or think you can long maintain it by brute force alone, now that all faith in it is extinct? Threatened and undermined on every side, can you hold all Europe forever in a stage of siege?" [1]

Pasteur sees the same issue looming even in his day and states it in burning words at the close of his life:

"Two contrary laws seem to be wrestling with each other nowadays, the one a law of blood and of death, ever seeking new means of destruction and forcing nations to be constantly ready for the battlefield; the other a law of peace, work, and health, ever evolving new means of delivering man