Heroes in Peace: The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 — John Shaqi
Heroes in Peace: The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920Holmes, John Haynes
Philosophy
Heroes in Peace: The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920
Holmes, John Haynes
Heroes
and then, with weary heart, leaves all these things behind to perish in
"the misery of the soaking trench," we find the sublimity of sacrifice.
The true soldier is indeed a hero. In this age, of all ages of human
history, are we unable to give denial to this fact. Millions of men, on
a dozen different battle-fronts, have recently taught us the heroisms
which make war almost as glorious as it is hideous. Not a day passed
during more than four terrible years, but what we read with tingling
hearts how brave men suffered without complaint, and died without fear,
for the countries that they loved. I remember, for example, reading on
a certain day in 1916, in a single copy of an evening newspaper, of
three young soldiers who were heroes. One was a German lad, unnamed, who
was found stricken unto death by the side of a dead Englishman, whose
wounds he had tried to staunch, and whose thirst he had quenched from
the water of his own canteen--a second Sir Philip Sidney, nobler than
the first, since he gave succor not to a friend but to an enemy. The
second man was an Englishman, Capt. Alexander Seaton, who fell fighting
bravely at the Dardanelles. A classical scholar of repute, a fellow in
Pembroke College, Cambridge, devoted to his work as a tutor and lecturer
in history, it was written of him, by one who knew and loved him, "Not a
soldier by inclination, he left his peaceful life at Pembroke solely
because he conceived that his duty lay that way, and that the hour had
come for every man to strike a blow for his country." The third man was
a Frenchman, a poet, Ernest Psichari by name, who fell at Verton, in
Belgium. "His battery had been ordered to keep the enemy in check while
the army was falling back," ran the story. "They were expected to hold
their ground for a few hours, and they did so for a whole day; and when
the last shell had been spent, officers and gunners were killed to a man
on the guns they had taken care to render unusable."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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