I
Compare this England of to-day
With England as she once has been.
Here and there, in or near towns and villages all about these Islands, in the summer of 1918, when I am writing this, you will come upon public gardens and recreation grounds that, nowadays, are looking strangely desolate. One such garden, an old pleasaunce from which the noise of the City is walled out, lies near the centre of London, and I cannot pass it now without an impulse to bare my head. There is no grass on the wide lawn that in other years was trim and green. It has been worn away by the feet of the young recruits I have seen training there in successive companies, some in khaki, some still in civilian dress, since the first days of the war; and the quiet, flower-bordered space is as black and bare to-day as if no grass had ever grown over it. The feet that have trodden it so have toiled since through the mud of France and
