Page:Mr. Punch's history of the Great War, Graves, 1919.djvu/294

 surgeons and heroic nurses, stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers. But Mr. Punch's special heroes are the Second Lieutenants and the Tommy who went on winning the War all the time and never said that he was winning it until it was won.

As for the young officers, dead and living, their record is the best answer to the critics, mostly of the arm-chair type, who have chosen this time to assail our public school system. In the papers of one of them killed on August 28 there was found an article written in reply to "The Loom of Youth," ending with these words: "Perhaps the greatest consolation of these attacks on our greatest heritage in England (for we are the unique possessors of the Public Schools) is the conviction that they will have but little effect. Every public school boy is serving, and one in every six gives up his life. They cannot be such bad places after all."

Of the great mistakes made by Germany perhaps the greatest was in reckoning on the detachment of the Dominions. The Canadians have made answer on a hundred stricken fields before and after Vimy Ridge. Australia gave her goodliest at Gallipoli, crowning the imperishable glory of those who died there by her refusal to make a grievance of the apparent failure of the expedition, and by the amazing achievement of her troops in the last six months of the War.

The immortal dead, British, Australians, New Zealanders, who fell in the great adventure of the narrow straits are not forgotten in the hour of triumph.

unforgotten, that for a great dream died,
 * Whose failing sense darkened on peaks unwon,

Whose souls went forth upon the wine-dark tide
 * To seas beyond the sun,

Far off, far off, but ours and England's yet, Know she has conquered! Live again, and let
 * The clamouring trumpets break oblivion!

Not as we dreamed, nor as you strove to do,
 * The strait is cloven, the crag is made our own;