[1] Written on the day of the interment of the Unknown Warrior in
Westminster Abbey.
We shall not know his name. It will never be known, and we should
not seek to know it. For in that nameless figure that is borne over
land and sea to mingle its dust with the most sacred dust of England,
we salute the invisible hosts of the fallen. We do not ask his name
or whence he comes. His name is legion and he comes from a hundred
fields, stricken with a million deaths.
Gaily or sadly, he went out to battle. We see him, as in a vision,
streaming in by a thousand roads, down from the Hebrides and the
glens of the North, from the mines of Durham and the shipyards of the
Clyde and Tyne and the bogs of Ireland, out of the factories of
Lancashire and Yorkshire, up from the pastures of East Anglia and the
moors of Devon, over the seas from distant lands, whither he had gone
to live his life and whence he returns at the call of a duty that
transcends life. In his speech we hear the echoes of a hundred
countrysides, from the strong burr of Aberdeen to the lilt of Dorset
and the broad-vowelled speech of Devon; but whatever the accent it
mingles in that song about Tipperary which, by the strangest of
ironies, lives in the mind with the sound of the tramp of millions to
battle.
He takes a thousand shapes in our minds. We see him leaving the
thatched cottage in some remote village, his widowed mother standing
at the doorway and shading her eyes to catch the last glimpse of him
as he turns into the high-road that shuts him from her sight; we see
him throwing aside his books and bounding out of school or college
with the light of adventure in his eye; we see him closing his little
shop, laying aside his pen, putting down mallet and chisel, hammer
and axe. We see him taking a million pitiful farewells, his young
wife hanging about his neck in an agony of grief, his little children
weeping for they know not what, with that dread foreboding that is
the affliction of childhood, the old people standing by with a sorrow
that has passed beyond the relief of tears. Here he is the lover and
there the son and there the husband and there the brother, but
everywhere he is the sacrifice. While others remain behind, perhaps
to win ignoble riches and rewards, he goes out to live in mud and
filth and die a lonely and horrible death far from his home and all
that he loved.
And he is chosen, not because he is the tainted wether of the flock,
meetest for sacrifice, but because he is the pride of the flock. In
him we see the youth of England, all that is bravest and best and
richest in promise, brains that could have won the priceless
victories of peace, sinews that could have borne the burden of
labour, singers and poets and statesmen in the green leaf, the Rupert
Brookes, the Raymond Asquiths, the Gladstones, the Keelings, the
finest flower of every household, all offered as a sacrifice on the
insane and monstrous altar of war.
And with the mind's eye we follow him as he is swallowed up in the
furnace. We see him falling on that desperate day at Suvla Bay,
perishing in the deserts of Mesopotamia, struck down in the snowstorm
on Vimy Ridge, dying on the hundred battlefields of the Somme,
disappearing in the sea of mud churned up at Passchendaele, falling
like autumn leaves in the deadly salient of Ypres, stricken in those
unforgettable days of March, when the Fifth Army broke before the
German onset. His bones lie scattered over a thousand alien fields
from the Euphrates to the Scheldt and lie on the floor of every
wandering sea. From the Somme to Zeebrugge his cemeteries litter the
landscape, and in those graves lie the youth of England and the
hearts of those who mourn.
Now one comes back, the symbol of all who have died and who will
never return. He comes, unknown and unnamed, to take his place among
the illustrious dead. And it is no extravagant fancy to conceive the
spirits of that great company, the Chathams and Drydens and Johnsons,
poets, statesmen and warriors, receiving him into their midst in the
solemn Abbey as something greater and more significant than they.
For in him they will see the emblem of the mightiest tribute ever
laid on the nation's altar. In him we do reverence to that
generation of Britain's young menhood that perished in the world's
madness and sleeps for ever in foreign lands.
None of us will look on that moving scene without emotion. But
something more will be required of us than a spasm of easy, tearful
emotion that exhausts itself in being felt. What have we, the
living, to say to the dead who pass by in shadowy hosts? They died
for no mean thing. They died that the world might be a better and a
cleaner place for those who lived and for those who come after. As
that unknown soldier is borne down Whitehall he will issue a silent
challenge to the living world to say whether it was worthy of his
sacrifice. And if we are honest with ourselves we shall not find the
answer easy.