It has shown that a single hatred may infect a world, but it has shown
that mercy too may spread among nations. That love is greater than
cannon, greater than hate, greater than vengeance; that it triumphs
over wrath, as good triumphs over evil.
Direct descendant of the cross of the Christian faith, the Red Cross
carries onto every battlefield the words of the Man of Mercy:
"Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy."
On a day in March I went back to England. March in England is spring.
Masses of snowdrops lined the paths in Hyde Park. The grass was green,
the roads hard and dry under the eager feet of Kitchener's great army.
They marched gayly by. The drums beat. The passers-by stopped. Here
and there an open carriage or an automobile drew up, and pale men,
some of them still in bandages, sat and watched. In their eyes was the
same flaming eagerness, the same impatience to get back, to be loosed
against the old lion's foes.
All through England, all through France, all through the tragic corner
of Belgium that remains to her, were similar armies drilling and
waiting, equally young, equally eager, equally resolute. And the thing
that they were going to I knew. I had seen it in that mysterious
region that had swallowed up those who had gone before; in the
trenches, in the operating rooms of field hospitals, at outposts where
the sentries walked hand in hand with death.
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