THE HEART OF EMPIRE STIRRED
If Australasia sought reward for the devotion and heroism displayed
in the time of the peril of the whole Empire, other than the
consciousness of duty done ungrudgingly and continuously, that reward
has surely been accorded by the proud Mother Country. From the King
himself down to the humblest of his subjects, Britons have shared
with the Southern nations all the sentiments that have been elicited
by the performance of Australasians in their first great essay at
waging war.
London, the very Heart of the Empire, has been from time to time
profoundly stirred as the news of some exploit by the representatives
of Australasia has been received. It laughed with glee at the
discomfiture of the boasting captain of the _Emden_, and gladly
recognized the maiden prowess of the young Australian fleet. It
thrilled with sympathetic pride for the great charge up the cliff at
Gaba Tepe; and accepted without cavil the generous estimate of one
of the foremost British war correspondents: "It is certainly the
most remarkable climb in the history of war since Wolfe stormed the
heights of Quebec."
Most grateful of all to hundreds of sorrowing hearts in Australasia,
London turned aside from its own countless griefs to mourn with
Australasia the loss of the brave dead from the South. Nothing was
more eloquent of the profound stir at the Heart of the Empire than
that solemn memorial service to the Australasian dead held in St.
Paul's Cathedral on the evening of June 15, 1915. In that sacred
building, where repose the mortal remains of Nelson, Wellington, and
many another great one who died for the Empire that Australasia is
so proud to serve, there gathered an assemblage of mourners come to
pay a spontaneous tribute to the brave young men who had laid down
their lives for a great ideal. The King was represented there; and
the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Bonar Law, himself born in the Dominions
Overseas, attended on behalf of the Government. Great men and noble
women of all shades of opinion thronged in the aisles to pay their
tribute to the heroes dead, but never to be forgotten. And the
citizens of the greatest city of the world were represented by their
Lord Mayor, as by many a humble sympathizer who gained a place in the
thronged building as a mark of loving kindness to mourners so far
away, yet so near to the Empire's heart.
Some hundreds of Australasian soldiers were there--men who had fought
bravely by the side of the dead ones the Empire was mourning, and
had themselves sustained grave wounds in that Empire's defence. The
rays of the setting sun lit their dull khaki as it lit the brilliant
scarlet uniform of the bandsmen of the Grenadier Guards. The hush of
true mourning was on the mighty building, and every sentence of the
impressive sermon preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury could be
heard in the farthest corner.
The Primate, who took for his text St. John xv. 13--"Greater
love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends"--said:
"We are met to-night for a definite and a very sacred purpose. Here
at the centre and hub of the Empire's life, we desire to thank God
together for the splendid devotion of our brothers from Australia and
New Zealand, who in the cause whereto we as a people have set our
hand regarded not their lives unto the death. It is as Christians
that we are here to-night, as men and women, that is, who hold
definitely to certain great truths, and are not ashamed to say so. We
are firm in the belief that the bit of life which we spend here--be
it, on man's reckoning, long or short--is not all. This part of it is
of vital moment. It is a great opportunity. It is a high trust. It is
capable of splendid use. But it is quite certainly--as we Christians
view it--not all. It is part of something larger, something with a
nobler range.
"And Christ has to do with all of it, here and hereafter, and He
made it clear that in His eyes it matters vitally how we spend and
use this part of it, how we devote it, how, if need calls, we lay it
down. He spoke of those things to His friends on the night before He
died, when the full moonlight was flooding the upper room, and He
was bidding them farewell. This is only a part, He told them, but
it ought to be a glad and bright part, of the larger life. And its
gladness, its joy, would depend, in each man's case, upon whether
he had learned the greatness of its value as something to be used,
devoted, laid down, if need be, for the sake of other people. That
was the key to His life, His joy; it would be the key to theirs. He
bid them try to understand it so. That, He says, was why He had been
reminding them of what He had come to do. 'These things I have spoken
unto you.' Why? 'That my joy'--the joy of ready sacrifice for others,
the true test of love--'might remain in you, and that your joy might
be full.... Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down
his life for his friends.'
"You see, my brothers and sisters, how all that bears upon the
thought which is just now sweeping across and through us as a
people, and which helps to crowd these seats to-night. We want, as
Christians, to say together in St. Paul's this evening that we
honestly, deliberately, believe these fearful perils, these wounded
or stricken bodies of our best and bravest, these saddened hearths
and darkened homes, to be worth while. And if they are 'worth while,'
they are right. The offering, terrible as it is, ought to be made
without reserve for the sake of what is, as we deliberately judge,
the cause of truth and honour, the cause of good faith and ordered
liberty among the peoples of Europe and of the world. It is a duty
grave, inspiring, urgent, which ought to rally us every one.
"I do not pause to ask whether the sacrifice would be worth while
if this life on earth were all. I think it would, but I need not
dwell upon that now. It is as Christians that we meet to-night, and
to a belief in the larger life lying behind and around and beyond
what we see, a Christian, however bewildered he feel about how
it can all work out, is clearly pledged. Most of us, I suppose,
whisper longingly at times, perhaps in hours like this we say out,
almost imperatively, 'We want to know more, a great deal more, about
the nature, even the particulars, of that other life. They are so
difficult to picture in plain words in their relation to what we are
familiar with here, and the more we try to work out the vision the
more bewildered we grow. Is there nothing in the Bible to tell us
plainly how it all will be, or, rather, how it all is?'
"The answer is not difficult. The Bible does not furnish any such
detailed answer to our longing inquiry. It gives us unchallengeably
the sure and certain faith in that greater life. That faith underlies
as a firm basis the whole New Testament. But neither in vision nor
parable is the veil wholly drawn aside. As the old seer said, 'The
secret things belong unto the Lord our God,' and these are among
the secret things. We know little; but what we do know we know for
certain. Remember this. We are loyal to our Lord Christ, Whose life
was the light of men, and Whose words and teaching are our strength
and stay. We believe Him whatever else we doubt.
"Now, take any section, say, any five chapters of the Gospel story,
about what He said and did. Read them anew, trying, as you read, to
destroy or do without the basis and background of that other larger
life, and you will find the account, I do not hesitate to say,
simply unintelligible as words of truth. The belief, the knowledge
as to that larger life underlies and colours the whole, and makes it
literally true to say that if we are Christians, if we are believers
in Him at all, that certitude which He gives us is and must be ours.
Without it you cannot advance a yard in the understanding of what His
Gospel meant. On that last evening He told them He was going away.
But why? 'I go to prepare a place for you ... that where I am there
ye may be also.' That is to say, 'You are to live on and to work on.'
What meaning else for some of the most uplifting and inspiring of
the parables which He had given them? 'Thou hast been faithful over
a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou
into the joy of thy Lord.' What meaning for the story of the rich man
and Lazarus? What meaning for the words of definite and uplifting
promise to the thief upon the cross? 'To-day shalt thou be with Me in
Paradise.' And so we might run on. Brothers, to us Christians it is
not a hope only, it is a sure and certain hope.
"It is well to remember that this is so when in the cloudy and dark
day we are fretting and wondering and seem only to stretch lame hands
and grope. But we perhaps ask: 'Why, why, this absence of some clear
exposition of it all?' Well, what if, to our present faculties, such
knowledge would be literally unconveyable in terms that we could
understand? Many here are familiar with--some perhaps have ere now
quoted--a certain picture-parable which belongs specially to this
Cathedral. Just two centuries ago, the Christian philosopher, George
Berkeley, a singularly clear thinker, was standing, as he tells us,
in St. Paul's Cathedral, where he noticed a little fly crawling
on one of those great pillars. He had been uplifted in thought by
the overwhelming grandeur of symmetry and design in pier and arch
and dome and gallery, and the relation of each part to each and to
the whole. And then he watched the little crawling fly, to whom no
understanding of the whole was possible, who could see nothing of its
harmonies, and to whom, as he puts it, 'nothing could appear but the
small inequalities in the surface of the hewn stone, which in the
view of the insect seemed so many deformed rocks and precipices.'
Here, he thought, is the likeness of each human being as he creeps
along. The sorrow which, like some dreadful precipice, interrupts
our life, may turn out to be nothing but the joining or cement
which binds the portions and sections of the greater life into one
beautiful and harmonious whole. The dark path may be but the curve
which, in the full daylight of a brighter world, will be seen to be
the inevitable span of some majestic arch. 'Now I know in part,' and
what a very little part it is, 'but then shall I know even as also I
am known.'
"Does all that seem poor and vague and cheerless to the young wife
across whose sunny home the dark shadow has fallen, to the mother
who, through all her brave faith, looks out dazed and dry-eyed upon
the shattering of the hopes which had been her daily happiness
and strength? The message is not--or it will not always be--vague
and cheerless if the firm and even glad courage with which a few
months ago she offered willingly what she loved best on earth, be
transmuted now into trustful prayer and into loyal proud thankfulness
for duty nobly done, and into quiet awaiting of the ampler life
beyond, with the answer it must bring in His good time to the
questions of the aching heart. Which of us but has been inspired
already by what Our Father has shown us to be possible--nay, rather
to be actually attained--in the ennobled lives of those whom He 'out
of weakness has made strong.' There is, for we are seeing it every
day, as real a heroism of the stricken home as the heroism of the
shell-swept trench, or of the quivering deck. For that, too, for
those brave women in England, or in the Southern Seas, we are upon
our knees to-night, thanking 'the God of all comfort Who comforteth
us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them
which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are
comforted of God.'
"But in this great gathering to-night we want another note besides
that. We must have the triumph-note for those whose self-sacrifice
has meant so much to their country and to those who honour them. It
has been theirs, in enthusiastic eager self-surrender, to reach what
Christ marks as the highest grade of human love. 'Greater love hath
no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.'
Gratefully and reverently we remember that heroism now. That is what
brings us here for thanksgiving and for prayer. Among the lives
laid down could be found, as always, bright examples of the young
leadership to which we had looked for upholding among their fellows
the spirit which sets manliness upon the surest basis, the basis of
personal loyalty to Christ. For those lives and for the footprints
which they have left upon the sands of time we give praise to God
to-day.
"But it would be unnatural, untrue, to claim for all who thus gave
their lives in their country's cause, the character of stainless
purity, or of the saintliness which we sing of in our hymns. Some
of them, perhaps many of them, were not 'saints' at all. They were
manly sons of the greatest Empire in the world. They were brave
and buoyant, with plenty of the faults and failures which go so
often with high spirit. They need, as we shall need, forgiveness
and cleansing and new opportunity, and they are in their Father's
keeping, and He knows and cares. Be it theirs--shall we not pray it
with all our hearts?--be it theirs, under His good hand, to pass
onward in the new and larger life from strength to strength.
Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow!
For never shall their aureoled presence lack:
I see them muster in a gleaming row,
With ever-youthful brows that nobler show:
We find in our dull road their shining track;
In every nobler mood
We feel the orient of their spirit glow,
Part of our life's unalterable good.
"Do these words seem too high for what we are remembering? I think
not. This vast war, without parallel in history for the horrible
scale and sweep of its devastating bloodshed, is unparalleled in
other ways as well. The feat of arms which was achieved on the rocky
beach and scrub-grown cliff of the Gallipoli Peninsula in the grey
dawn of St. Mark's Day, April 25, was a feat, we are assured, whose
prowess has never been outshone, has scarcely ever been rivalled, in
military annals. As the open boats, under a hail from hidden guns,
poured out their men in thousands on the beach, below perpendicular
cliffs of tangled scrub, the task of breasting those heights looked,
to many expert eyes, a sheer impossibility. But by the dauntless
gallantry of brave men the impossible feat was accomplished, and the
record of those hours and of the days which followed is now a portion
of our Empire's heritage for ever.
"And who did it? It was not the product of the long discipline of
some veteran corps of soldiers. It was mainly the achievement of men
from sheep-stations in the Australian Bush, or from the fields or
townships of New Zealand, who a few short months ago had no dream
of warfare as, like other civilians, they went about their ordinary
work. But the call rang out, and the response was ready, and the
result is before us all. 'I have never,' says one competent observer
after the battle, 'I have never seen the like of these wounded
Australians in war before. They were happy because they knew they had
been tried for the first time, and had not been found wanting. No
finer feat of arms has been performed during the war than this sudden
landing in the dark, the storming of the heights, and, above all, the
holding on to the position thus won while reinforcements were poured
from the transports.'
"It is high praise, but the witness is true, and those Australians
and New Zealanders are enrolled among the champions whom the Empire,
for generations to come, will delight to honour. One of the best
traits of all is the generous tribute given by each group to the
indomitable valour of the rest. To quote from the private letter of a
young New Zealander: 'The Australians were magnificent, and deserve
every good word that is said of them.' And all unite to praise the
officers, midshipmen, and men who formed the beach parties in that
eventful landing, each boat, we are reminded, 'in charge of a young
midshipman, many of whom have come straight from Dartmouth after only
a couple of terms.'
"But of necessity it was at fearful cost that these gallant deeds
were done, and the great roll of drums under this dome to-night
will reverberate our reverent and grateful sympathy to the Empire's
farthest bound. This memorable act of stoutest service gives
response already to the rallying call of the poet-bishop of Australia:
By all that have died for men,
By Christ who endured the Cross,
Count nothing but honour gain,
Count all that is selfish loss.
Take up with a loyal heart
The burden upon you laid;
Who fights on the side of God
Needs never be afraid.
Be true to the great good land,
And rear 'neath the Southern sun
A race that shall hold its own,
And last till the world be done.[2]
"When in conditions the hardest and the most unpromising, Australia
and New Zealand came successively to the birth a century ago, as a
living part of the British Empire, who would have dared to fashion
in remotest vision the stern, yet romantic, story of 1915? The eager
manhood of the young raw Commonwealth, the product of our own time,
first carried with swift safety across the successive seas, then
disciplined and prepared for action under the shadow of the world-old
Pyramids, and then gaining their first experience of the shock of
the onset within sight and hearing of the plains of Troy--an almost
inconceivable intermingling of the old world and the new. The bare
story is itself a stimulus and a reminder of what the lessons of
history and the trust of Empire mean.
"God give us grace so to bear ourselves as a united people that
we may be building out of this welter of fearful pain and strife
the walls of His greater kingdom upon earth, the kingdom that is
to endure: when the nations of the earth, and not least our own
peoples--Britain and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South
Africa and India--bring into it, each of them, their honour and their
glory, the distinctive powers and blessings that God has given to
each several one, to make glad the city of our God, the habitation of
the Prince of Peace."
At the conclusion of the Archbishop's sermon the band of the Guards
played the Dead March in "Saul"; the bugles rang out in the "Last
Post," and the mourners reverently left the building. So London paid
its tribute to Australasia's dead.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] _Australia_, by Dr. Gilbert White, Bishop of Carpentaria.
THE SECOND DIVISION