Nov, 11.
The years that have passed ince the event recalled to-day have been fourteen points. of disillusionment and, happily, unfaltering hope. Of the visions discarded, plans modified, schemes abandoned, some have remained unaltered. Chief among them is the duty of honouring the Great Dead and attending, as part of the same piety, to the interest of their living comrades. However far the world may be from complete allegiance to the ideals enthroned in the Covenant, it is true to say that memory of the gigantic travail, which this day brought to an end in 1918, has steeled men's will to refuse defeat and! to persevere with the effort. in; mobilisation of peace. Short though accomplishment "may. of intention, the world to-day realises as, perhaps, never be-! fore how ' great a thing the League may be. To those who look squarely at the fruits of, victory—or it were fitter to say of death—it becomes apparent that the only solid gain is the creation of that bulwark against another war. Tt may be feeble, breached in many places, liable to destruction by sheer neglect; when s0 much is obscure, even to the wisest, it stands clear, lambent peak of hope, piercing the clouds of revived' distrust and despair, The men and women, whose memories speak to-day, made their sacrifice for the purpose which the Leagu with all its acts, has been formed to vas not they whose AS glances go back across these fourteen years and the still deadly perils of age are sensed, it seems incredible that natio waged in a struggle made the Homeric fade into pigmy ensign ficance, should not have realised the impossibility of a swift recovery, History" alone could have guided them. And it is fair to say that misguided reliance on some miraculous power of defying the forces of economic gravity has helped to retard solution That is why, in remembering those whose Day this is, it is well to try and recapture the spirit of their epic. Who, seeking desperately to solve the problems which so mightily oppress the world, has not yearned for the influence of that spirit to be restored. In some sort the wish has been fulfilled for, in Great Britain, the national crisis of last year made men and women once more speak in terms of sacrifice. The danger was averted but still is close at hand. Therefore, if fainter than before, the spirit es. It is fitting to speak of the men who lie beneath the Grosses of Remembrance, in terms of their wonderful courage which was not afraid to feat They rejoiced not in the grim horrors of their task, the sufferings it imposed; they rejoiced as their ancestors did?
"And Crispin Crispian shall never From this day to the ending of]
the world But we in it shall be remembered; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers."
Let not a false fastidiousness mislead. Efforts in late years to picture the soldier as the victim of a bestial transformation are just as fantastic as those which seek to make of war a bravery of colour and glowing panoply of glory. To-morrow night, perchance, some of the old war-time songs will be re sung, Their sentimentalism, thei cynical disclaimer of the herois. should be set side by side with the coarse ribaldry of ditties and jests which peacetime prefers to muffle. The coarseness was no more real than the flamboyant: pretensions it sought to correct. "Our Army swore terribly in Flanders" was Uncle Toby's verdict. And, when that modern of moderns, the author of St. Joan, affects to' see in Shakespeare nothing but a subsidised sycophant of Elizabethan glamour, the words put into the mouth of Private Williants at Agincourt may well be cited to focus the true import of St. Crispin's Day:
"But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckon ing to make, when all those legs farms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all—We died at such place some swan ings some crying for a sur some, upon their wives left Dooe behind them; some, upon the debts they owe; some, upon their children rawly left. {am afeard there are few that die well, that dic in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is" their" argument?
Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection."
Have the modern realists put their case in better words?
Brothers" must be honoured, In So, the "Band of the act special care should be taken to heed the appeal of practical benevolence seeking to pay a solemn debt..As the years have passed, the "problem of providing for the ex-service man becomes at once lighter and more onerous. It is impossible to say how far the services performed in those war years have left their mark upon the living of that Band. Men have passed on; their vacant places, too often, are taken by others whose disabilities, directly due to War, did not appear in the early days of Peace, Breakdowns have unexpectedly occurred to ehske a family's existence to the foundation. They may be found to have had their origin in the shattering inferno of the ordeal round which the shadows have gathered. And as the better perceives the magnitude of the shock which it endured, appreciation more clearly extends to the fact that succour of the ex-Service man is a prime complementary accessory to the general effort towards recover To this end the green tributes of remembrance are paid. They are symbols of reverence, for, when supreme danger is passed, value to humanity in recognition of the spirit in which that danger was confronted. Time blurs the picture of those war-years as they dragged to the surface the fundamental nobility in man, despite the revelations of stark evil. The countless acts of self-sacrifice in trench and field, afloat and alef: the heroic fortitude of separ the brave acceptance of Seemingly meaningless bereave ments; the defiant gaiety; the disciplined tolerance of error; the grim tenacity; all that was enfolded in the single word "duration." "For the duration" men and women suffered, died and strove—eovering their pangs with a cloak of self-depreciatory jest and strengthening their resistance with a unity, imperturbable and unbreakable. Salute to the Dead and Living in that great adventure is made to-day. Let it be worthy of its charge.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.