LETTERS' TO THE EDITOR.
[Leiters of the length of one of our leading paragraphs are often snore read, and therefore snore effective, than those which fill treble the space.]
A TIMELY MESSAGE.
(To TIM EDITOR OP TER SPECTATORVI lim,—You may think it helpful to publish the following extract 110/11 a letter written by an officer who was killed in the battle of Cambrai. Surely the writer's dauntless resolution to tolerate no trims with an evil principle must have a wholesome effect just vow. The letter is indeed a noble and inspiring message from the " Alas! I never have a whiff of living France except occasionally one can imagine that a far distant rumble to the southward is the voice of the incomparable seventy-fives. ' Vivent les eeixante- guinea! '—a thrilling cry to me. As I wrote the date on the top of this letter, sitting by a white roadside, on a hot morning of violet horizons, my mind jumped to the story of forty-seven Augusts ago. What a neighbour for the leaders of our civilization! What a brutal abomination! Twice in half a century to vent a childish spite on these tenderly loved fields and villages. It is an incon- ceivable outrage, and rouses at times in me an Old Testament cry, Down with it, down with it even to the ground.' Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, all pronounced their culminating anathema on the rulers who made terms with their enemies. Something of their strength of soul might well be ours, but the time is not yet. Pixel we have manfully to wipe out the Main of our own meanness and poverty of outlook, but I hope the time-may come when with an authority sanctioned beyond cavil by our steadfastness and sufferings, we may he able to say to a foe beneath our heel ' We take the full responsibility for this long continuanoe of war. Thus would we have it and so we will do again to you and all the sort of you.' I hate this arguing about who began the war. We ehould be proud to say we are fighting with all our might against the lowest conceptions of national life. The village is infinitely touching here. It was a subetantial, soigne, little place. Out of the heaps of ruins little traces of decoration on window or pillar convey a sense of former dignity. The largest heap was meaningless to use for days, till I noticed a single minute croes on a block of whits stone. I hear a few people have been men coming back to look at the town of Charles glemeraire's Castle, and after gazing helplessly at the ruins have gone pitifully away again. What an undertaking to repatriate the whole country, to win it back again from wilderness! That will be yet another French epic."
Previous page
