What if the dead came to life and could not die? Well when we behold the terrible loss of so many young lives, when we see so many physical of intellect and of glorious promise pitilessly cut off in their first flower, we are on the verge of despair. Never before have the fairest energies and aspirations of men been flung recklessly and incessantly.

For more than twelve months, on every battlefield, where the bravest, the truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are necessarily the first to die and where the less courageous, the less generous, the weak, in a word less desirable, alone possess some chance of escaping for over twelve months a sort of monstrous inverse selection has been in operation. One which seems to be seeking the downfall of the human race.

The problem is certainly one of the darkest that have ever the minds of men. It contains a material truth before which we remain defenseless and, if we accept it as it stands we can discover the evil that threatens. On the other hand, mankind appears to be such a necessary and indestructible force of nature that has always, survived the most desperate ordeals, but succeeded in benefiting by them and emerging greater and stronger than before.

We know that peace is better than war; it was horrible to compare the two. We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of unutterable had not come upon the world, mankind would have reached a wonderful achievement it is impossible to foreshadow. All those forces of wisdom, patience, honor and self-sacrifice which increase day by day and which we ourselves, who are far from the field of danger, feel rising within us without knowing whence they come are nothing but the souls of the heroes gathered and absorbed by our own souls.

Death does not injure life it is powerless against it. Life never changes. What death takes from those who fall enters into those who are left standing? But the flame rises higher. Death is in no wise the gainer so long as there are living men. The more it exercises its ravages, the more it increases the intensity of that which it cannot touch; the more it pursues its phantom victories, the better does it prove to us that man will end by conquering death