The Glory of English Prose: Letters to My GrandsonColeridge, Stephen
History
The Glory of English Prose: Letters to My Grandson
Coleridge, Stephen
Coleridge, Stephen, 1854-1936; English language -- Great Britain -- Style; English prose literature -- History and criticism
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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