PUTTING DEATH IN ITS PLACE.

Colonist, Volume LX, Issue 14545, 25 October 1917, Page 2

PUTTING DEATH IN ITS PLACE.

(By James Hodson in "London Daily

Mail")

This war has put death in its place. It Ims tumbled it from that i:earsomo pinnacle it perched on before the war, that pinnacle supported bj heart-rend-ing wailings and gnashings of teeth, and it has made it—if one may use the word, homelier, commoner, more! of a consummation and less of a cutting oif of the human lite.

"if 1 should die, think only this of me^-that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England," and again: "The dead will not hurt the spring"—were written by soldiers who had sensed already, maybe, the death that was to be the radiant crown of a great life.

I remember when one read as a boy of the everyday dwellings of two generations before, how splendid it seemed —that running a foeman through and hearing the choking cough that spelt his death; and how terrible an atrair that same adventure was for us grownup shopkeeper English folk in 1913 to contemplate. • "We have become too civilised —too soft," a man of the world used to saj to me before the Avar, and I used to shake my head and laugh. He was right. We had magnified death till it was all mortuary and no romance, all horror and no glory. Well, the war has taken us back to the duelling days, when honour counted more than lie, and rightness more than ease.

The innate love of adventure, the ingrown patriotism, the inbred spirit of [England that long had lain dormant awaiting .the trumpet call, brought the i change quickly to our young men; the sorrow and pride in their valiant dead have brought it to those that stayed behind. I count it a great privilege to J have'received letters written to me, in France, by the relatives of "mates" of mine who had been killed. One fatliei, immediately on receipt of the news, could so put his grief aside as at once to send each man in the battalion a present. Another wrote bravely: "The news came as a great shock, but not as a surprise," and another lady who had lost both her gifted sons wrote: "1 do! not begrudge them' the honour oi' soldiers' graves. I know that is how they had wis-hed to die." Death must hide its head for very shamo before such conquering words as' these. j Who dies now, dies in noble com-' pany. Think of them that are with| the gallant dead —Charles Lister. Itay-; mond Asquith, William Iledmond, A. j F. Wilding, A. G. Poulton, Ivan Heald, j •Julian Gronfell. Kiiperfrl Brooke Dixon Scott, and Harold X'hapin. Who can I question that these mun have made' dying easier ? ■ I

One of my dearest friends said to me before we went to France: ''Dying for England would be the best thing I'liave done—my trump card." Well, ho has died, leaving his thought for us. Jlo is of

''Them that died that we might live, And, living, learn to plan A life like theirs, and then to give The earth rai Englishman."

11ns war has made dying an Englishman a glorious consummation; and death-—as 39J.3 understood it—is no more.