all morning and all afternoon, positions have been alternately taken by our soldiers and enemies. Battalions after battalions have been rushed forward only to fall under the veritable showers of death-dealing missiles, while those fortunate ones who have escaped the hell of fire are greeted with a phalanx of cold steel. And what do we see before us now? Hundreds of hundreds of dead and wounded are scattered all over the hill, friends and foes indiscriminately. Are not some of them yet writhing in their last agony? Where does that faint groaning come? Were not those stark corpses the most lively, most briskly moving bodies a few hours ago? Were not a courageous heart and a noble mind abiding in each one of them? The moon is just rising, and her pale light but enhances the ghastliness of the sight. The perfect stillness of horror! And I speak of this from my personal experience.

Now let me again ask: From where do these soldiers come? They must have parents--some of whom are aged and perhaps decrepit--sisters and brothers, and some of them must be even husbands and fathers on whom tender women and helpless children are depending. Now that their mainstays are gone and their beloved are forever departed, grief and suffering indescribable must be reigning in all these thousands of homes. Some of them, reduced to abject poverty and utter helplessness, must go begging

or to self-destruction to save themselves from shame. What wrong did they commit to be thus terribly punished? The wrong, if it be so called, was that they had able-bodied, strong-minded sons or husbands. What a heart-rending ordeal they have to pass!

This most saddening fact is brought home more forcibly when we are personally related to the unfortunate dead.

News of victory is welcome and we feel elated over it. But think of the price we have paid for it with thousands of precious human lives. And especially when we find some of our personal friends and acquaintances mentioned among the dead or seriously wounded, how depressingly the news weighs upon us! I often spend many hours at a time brooding over the sad event, my thoughts being deeply buried in the unfathomable problems of philosophy and religion, which have baffled many a wise man ever since the dawn of intellect. Though I have formed in my humble way my own welt- and lebensanschauung with which I interpret the affairs of the world and the phenomena of soul-life, I cannot help being struck with the calamities which follow in the wake of war. I am not necessarily absorbed in pessimism, but I feel an unspeakable feeling at the bottom of my heart and with wonder and awe think of a power by whose hand the course of this life and the destiny of the universe are directed.