"Even that black week at the end of May last year only served {o deepen the resolution of our countrymen and the Empire, and the conviction that the God in whom we trust would not fail nor forsake us. Our English regiments and Englishmen played a gallant part in the fighting in Northern France and Belgium, and in the retreat and evacuation from Dunkirk.
"It is particularly gratifying to learn that a member of one of the regiments we knew so well just a few years ago in Shanghai, in that fighting gained the highest honour it is possible for a soldier to receive—the Victoria Cross. Shortly after Dunkirk, our gallant ally, France, felt compelled to ask for an Armistice, and Britain was left as the sole bulwark of democracy in Western Europe.
"Englishmen throughout the world were doubly thrilled when a fighting Englishman, scion of one of our greatest English houses—the House of Marlborough,—was called to take the helm in the hour of crisis. Every Englishman honours Mr. Churchill as one who manifests in his own person the English ideals of courage and of service and of endurance. Ideals which are re-echoed by young and old in the great cities of the homeland as they pass through a erne! martyrdom.
"Tyrning to our own share in the struggle it is gratifying to record that a steady stream of our young men, and the older ones as well. has left during the past year to join up in some branch of His Majesty's Forces.
I would like to mention specially Mr. C. C. Todd who was elected a member of your committee last year. Mr. Todd served in the Great War of 1914-1918....He resigned from our committee in July. A good many years dropped from his shoulders on the way home, and he is back in the infantry as a serving officer.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.