Cemeteries -- Belgium; Cemeteries -- France; George V, King of Great Britain, 1865-1936; World War, 1914-1918 -- Cemeteries
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 wellnigh unbroken
chain they stretch, passing over the holy mount of Olives itself to
the farthest 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 Terlincthun, 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.
Never before in history have a people thus dedicated and maintained
individual memorials to their fallen, and, in the course of my
pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more
potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come, than
this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.
And I feel that, so long as we have faith in God's purposes, we cannot
but believe that the existence of these visible memorials will,
eventually, serve to draw all peoples together in sanity and
self-control, even as it has already set the relations between our
Empire and our allies on the deep-rooted bases of a common heroism and
a common agony.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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