Page:Great Speeches of the War.djvu/228

 We make no blasphemous and childish and pagan appeal to a tribal God, with a pickelhaube for a halo and a sword dripping with men's and women's and children's blood for a sceptre. We appeal to Galilee with its gospel, not of slavery, as the wretched Neitzsche shrieked in his delirium, and as Bernhardi writes in his brutal gospel of war, but as the gospel at once of freedom, justice, humanity, and peace among all men of goodwill,

Corsica against Galilee: this is the fundamental issue for which you are fighting, noble soldiers of ours, to-day. Happy warriors, whatever your fate; though you die, you will live for ever, A little cross, a single stone, will mark the spot where many of you may lie in indiscriminate heaps; the ashes of some of you are already commingling with the roots from which will spring the rich grass or the ripe corn. Others of you will be commemorated by statue, by tablet, in stone and in bronze. But you will have, whether in your obscure and unvisited graves or in your great mausoleums, a richer and a more imperishable monument; a monument which neither time nor war nor malice can ever destroy. The stories of your heroic lives and noble deaths can no more perish than the ocean that laps our shores. To the end of our history, generations will hear and brood over and drink in the story of your deeds; and millions yet unborn will fight the inner conflict between the good and the evil guardian on the battle-ground of every human soul; and millions will learn to turn the balance to the right side, and live more nobly and die more bravely, because you lived so nobly and died so bravely.

Galilee against Corsica! You fight for Galilee. It may be that you also will have to pass through the bloody sweat of your Gethsemanes, through the cruel Calvary of death; and you may find your last homes in the Golgothas of the battle-field. But from your perishable bodies your pure souls will rise on white wings beyond the stars.