“Mon Major, je suis déjà avec Dieu,” and instantly expired.
Every regiment must have its emblem; the minds of the men turn naturally to the symbolic.
“I’d like to look at the colours,” said a mortally wounded gunner to his Captain.
“Look at the guns, my man, those are the gunners’ colours!”
And the boy was uplifted to look, till his eye glazed.
We do not take the colours into action now, but we know what the Standard means to our Allies. It seems a pity that political revolution should have displaced the ancient lilies of France. There is something so grand in tradition. Dignity of noble ancestry is not confined to man alone. Houses possess it, and lands, and surely nations. Are not our soldiers to-day the heirs of the yeomen and bowmen of Agincourt?
“O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts!” is the prayer on the lips of all of us; and we feel through all, even as Harry the King, the same proud confidence in the good blood that cannot lie. Shall not those who stay at home “hold their manhoods cheap, whiles any speaks” of Mons, or Ypres, or—of those glories yet to come?
Thus, in a way, it seems to us that if France fights in her body under the Tricolour, in her soul she is fighting under the Lilies. It is the old France again, the France of the days of faith. In one of Joan of Arc’s visions she saw Charlemagne and St. Louis kneeling before the throne, pleading for the land they had loved and served. She who carried the Oriflamme may now form the third in that shining company and look down, perhaps, considering the lilies growing out of the field of blood. Perhaps she may say: “Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.”