And those humble lilies of the cloister that have fallen into sacrilegious grasp, we know how they have been considered; how Rheims, with its hawthorn porch, blossoming in stone flower of all the Christian shrines of all the world, stately lily of the days of faith, has fared at the hand of the German.
“_Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint_,” says the Spirit of Evil in Goethe’s “Faust.”
It has always seemed a marvellous definition; the negation of good, the spirit that ever denies. But the demon of present-day Germany comes from a deeper pit than Goethe’s intellectual mocking devil. It is the spirit that forever destroys.
The struggle has not brutalized but spiritualized our men. Through the appalling conditions in which they fight they reach out to the mystic side of things. When they speak of death they call it “going west.” It is the old, old Celtic thought of the Isle beyond the Sunset. They “talk of God a great deal,” as the soldiers’ letters tell us. The Irish Guards fell on their knees at Compiègne before making their famous attack up the hill. As they charged, “our men crossed the plain, hurrahing and singing, while many of them had a look of absolute joy on their faces.” They have their visions. A soldier lying wounded and helpless on the field and gazing agonized on the breach in our line, saw the Germans rush and then fall back; and beheld St. George standing in his armour in the gap; then heard the Lancastrians cry, as they dashed on: “St. George for England!”
What yet more august revelation did he have, that dying French sergeant, who, looking profoundly upon the surgeon who was ministering to him, replied to his encouragement:
“Mon Major, je suis déjà avec Dieu,” and instantly expired.
Every regiment must have its emblem; the minds of the men turn naturally to the symbolic.
“I’d like to look at the colours,” said a mortally wounded gunner to his Captain.
“Look at the guns, my man, those are the gunners’ colours!”
And the boy was uplifted to look, till his eye glazed.
We do not take the colours into action now, but we know what the Standard means to our Allies. It seems a pity that political revolution should have displaced the ancient lilies of France. There is something so grand in tradition. Dignity of noble ancestry is not confined to man alone. Houses possess it, and lands, and surely nations. Are not our soldiers to-day the heirs of the yeomen and bowmen of Agincourt?