19133 Counting Her Dead 



in the Hoover car - the one to Ely, Peterborough, 

 and Lincoln on the north, the other to Devon in 

 search of ancestral hearthstones, after which we ran 

 up to Stratford to bid our hosts goodby. During 

 both tours we again "collected" as many cathedrals 

 as possible, not only for their beauty but also because 

 of my desire to gather from their memorial tablets 

 some estimate of England's losses by war in the 

 last half century. Even during that brief period the ./ half 

 number seemed appallingly large! In nine cathedrals, "J*^ 

 as elsewhere stated, 1 I counted the names of 6101 

 men, mostly killed in India and South Africa; the 

 total number thus recorded must be approximately 

 16,000. Great Britain has also about 15,000 parish 

 churches containing tablets bearing perhaps 60,000 

 names, all told. The one thing of which a nation dies 

 is lack of men. A British officer once said to me: 

 "I have seen men who might have been makers of 

 Empires die like flies in India." 



It is only my dead I count, 

 She said, and she says today. 2 



Professor Thomson of Aberdeen sums up the 

 matter as follows: 



We admit that wars have been necessary and righteous - 

 especially necessary, and that they may be so still, but this 

 opinion does not affect the fact that a prolonged war in which 

 a nation takes part is bound to impoverish the breed, since the 

 character of the breed depends on the men who are left. 



Our special aim on the second jaunt was to visit Jordan in 

 the hamlet of Jordan in the parish of Widecombe-in- Devon 

 the-Moor, west of Exeter and about six miles from 



1 "War and the Breed," footnote, pages 176-177. 



2 Alfred Noyes. 



C 485 



