I have a friend, president of a large corporation which employs
thousands of men, who has been called to the head of a Department of a
certain war activity in Washington. He told me that they had given him
what seemed to be a very unimportant task, one that any clerk in his
employ could well discharge, "but," he said, "I am trying to make it
important by putting into it the best I have and the best that I can
do."
When that spirit grips us, every single one, we shall sweep forward to a
victory that nothing in all Germany can ever halt.
There is one other issue in this war, one other thing for which we
fight, and I have left it to the last.
Mr. La Follette tells us that we are going to war to protect our
investments, and we are. We have entered this war for just that
purpose; we have gone to war to protect our investments, but not our
stocks and bonds. Do you realize that ever since this war broke out in
1914, not a ship has sailed from any Atlantic port of America or Canada,
but that it has carried Americans, men of our flesh and blood, speaking
our language to fight this battle against the Beast. Wherever men have
fallen, these have fallen; wherever men have died, on the land, in the
air, on the sea or in German prison camps, these have died; their ashes
lie mingled with those of England's best, their bones rest in the soil
of Serbia, Italy, Belgium and France.
"We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this
ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have
consecrated it far above our power to add or detract.... It is for
us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced ... that
we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."
We all remember the vision of Constantine; that flaming cross gleaming
in the sky with the words written over it: "In hoc signo vinces." But
there is another vision of crosses that rises before our eyes. Little
crosses, white crosses, wooden crosses, that march in serried ranks
across the trench-scarred face of Europe from the North Sea to the Black
Sea--a veritable forest of crosses, low-lying, yet they throw a longer
and a darker shadow than cypress, hemlock or than pine, for beneath them
lie the great hearts of the Empire, of Belgium, France, Italy, Serbia,
and Roumania; they call to us, they wait for us.
"Who says their day is over, while others carry on
The little wooden crosses spell but the dead and gone?
Not while they deck a sky line, not while they crown a view,
Or a living soldier sees them and sets his teeth anew."
(E. W. HORNUNG.)
Now, listen:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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