Not every temporal sovereign of these realms has deserved a throne
among the kings of literature. James the First was a poet of some
merit; Charles the First wrote and spoke with a fine distinction; Queen
Victoria's letters to her subjects were models of dignified and kindly
simplicity; but to King George the Fifth by the grace of God it has been
reserved to give utterance to what I believe to be the most noble and
uplifting address ever delivered by a king to his people.
From the day of his accession King George has been confronted with
trials and troubles enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and none of us
can plumb the depth of anguish that must have been his through the
awful years of the Great War. He has been tried and proved in the
fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged ennobled by pain, and
dowered by sorrow with a gift of expression that has placed him among
the masters of the glory of English prose.
On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a tour of the cemeteries in
France at Terlinchthun, where there stands on the cliffs over-looking
the Channel a monument to Napoleon and his Grand Army, and around
it now lie the innumerable English dead.
Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and Lord Haig had in his presence
clasped hands, and the King with a fine gesture had placed his own
right hand upon their clasped ones and said, "Amis toujours!" We are
told that, "going up to the Cross of Sacrifice, the King looked out over
the closely marshalled graves to the sea, and back towards the woods
and fields of the Canche Valley where Montreuil stands, and seemed
reluctant to leave."
At last he turned, and, standing before the great Cross of Sacrifice, he
spoke from his heart words that those of us, Antony, who love our
country and the glory of its language will cherish while we live:--
"For the past few days I have been on a solemn pilgrimage in
honour of a people who died for all free men.
"At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I followed ways already
marked by many footsteps of love and pride and grief, I should
like to send a message to all who have lost those dear to them in
the Great War, and in this the Queen joins me to-day, amidst these
surroundings so wonderfully typical of that single-hearted
assembly of nations and of races which form our Empire. For here,
in their last quarters, lie sons of every portion of that Empire,
across, as it were, the threshold of the Mother Island which they
guarded, that Freedom might be saved in the uttermost ends of the
earth.
"For this, a generation of our manhood offered itself without
question, and almost without the need of a summons. Those proofs
of virtue, which we honour here to-day, are to be found throughout
the world and its waters--since we can truly say that the whole
circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead.
Beyond the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through
Eastern Europe in well-nigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing
over the holy Mount of Olives itself to the furthest shores of the
Indian and Pacific Oceans--from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk
to the hidden wildernesses of East Africa.
"But in this fair land of France, which sustained the utmost fury
of the long strife, our brothers are numbered, alas! by hundreds
of thousands.
"They lie in the keeping of a tried and generous friend, a
resolute and chivalrous comrade-in-arms, who with ready and quick
sympathy has set aside for ever the soil in which they sleep, so
that we ourselves and our descendants may for all time reverently
tend and preserve their resting-places.
"And here, at Terlinchthun, the shadow of his monument falling
almost across their graves, the greatest of French soldiers--of
all soldiers--stands guard over them. And this is just, for side
by side with the descendants of his incomparable armies they
defended his land in defending their own.
"Never before in history have a people thus dedicated and
maintained individual memorials to their fallen, and, in the
course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether
there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the
years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to
the desolation of war. And I feel that, so long as we have faith
in God's purposes, we cannot but believe that the existence of
these visible memorials will eventually serve to draw all peoples
together in sanity and self-control, even as it has already set
the relations between our Empire and our Allies on the deep-rooted
bases of a common heroism and a common agony.
"Standing beneath this Cross of Sacrifice, facing the great Stone
of Remembrance, and compassed by these sternly simple headstones,
we remember, and must charge our children to remember, that as our
dead were equal in sacrifice, so are they equal in honour, for the
greatest and the least of them have proved that sacrifice and
honour are no vain things, but truths by which the world lives.
"Many of the cemeteries I have visited in the remoter and still
desolate districts of this sorely stricken land, where it has not
yet been possible to replace the wooden crosses by headstones,
have been made into beautiful gardens which are lovingly cared for
by comrades of the war.
"I rejoice I was fortunate enough to see these in the spring, when
the returning pulse of the year tells of unbroken life that goes
forward in the face of apparent loss and wreckage; and I
fervently pray that, both as nations and individuals, we may so
order our lives after the ideals for which our brethren died that
we may be able to meet their gallant souls once more, humbly but
unashamed."
Hard indeed must it be for any Englishman whose heart is quick within
his bosom not to feel it beat faster with thanksgiving and pride as he
reads the flawless periods of this glorious speech.
As the final word of consolation, sanctification, and benediction, closing
the awful agony of the greatest of all wars, preserve, Antony, this
magnificent threnody in your memory imperishable.
Your loving old
G.P.
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