“They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learningDelivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burningWhither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour -Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her.Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption,Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marvelling, closed on them.That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was givenTo corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven -By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires -To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes - to be cindered by fires -To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilationFrom crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation. But who shall return us the children?”

“The Holy Scriptures were not givento us that we should enclose them in books, but that we should engrave them upon our hearts.”

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

“When we reach the hilltops of heaven, and look back upon all the way whereby the Lord our God hath led us, how shall we praise Him who, before the eternal throne, undid the mischief which Satan was doing upon earth. How shall we thank Him because He never held His peace, but day and night pointed to the wounds upon His hands, and carried our names upon His breastplate!”

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

“All of us , I believe , carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there :places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem'We are seven' ,our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened.By way of returning the compliment , we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far from them.”