THE FINAL
TOMMY;(ex-footballer): "We was just wipin' them off the face of the earth when Foch blows his whistle and shouts 'Temps!'"
These are only some of the heroes who have added to the glories of our blood and State, but the roll is endless--wonderful gunners and sappers and airmen and dispatch riders, devoted surgeons and heroic nurses, stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers. But Mr. Punch's special heroes are the Second Lieutenants and the Tommy who went on winning the War all the time and never said that he was winning it until it was won.
As for the young officers, dead and living, their record is the best answer to the critics, mostly of the arm-chair type, who have chosen this time to assail our public school system. In the papers of one of them killed on August 28 there was found an article written in reply to "The Loom of Youth," ending with these words: "Perhaps the greatest consolation of these attacks on our greatest heritage in England (for we are the unique possessors of the Public Schools) is the conviction that they will have but little effect. Every public school boy is serving, and one in every six gives up his life. They cannot be such bad places after all."
Of the great mistakes made by Germany perhaps the greatest was in reckoning on the detachment of the Dominions. The Canadians have made answer on a hundred stricken fields before and after Vimy Ridge. Australia gave her goodliest at Gallipoli, crowning the imperishable glory of those who died there by her refusal to make a grievance of the apparent failure of the expedition, and by the amazing achievement of her troops in the last six months of the War.
The immortal dead, British, Australians, New Zealanders, who fell in the great adventure of the narrow straits are not forgotten in the hour of triumph.
Qui procul hinc ante diem perierunt.
Ye unforgotten, that for a great dream died,
Whose failing sense darkened on peaks unwon,
Whose souls went forth upon the wine-dark tide
To seas beyond the sun,
Far off, far off, but ours and England's yet,
Know she has conquered! Live again, and let
The clamouring trumpets break oblivion!
Not as we dreamed, nor as you strove to do,
The strait is cloven, the crag is made our own;
The salt grey herbs have withered over you,
The stars of Spring gone down,
And your long loneliness has lain unstirred
By touch of home, unless some migrant bird
Flashed eastward from the white cliffs to the brown.
Hard by the nameless dust of Argive men,
Remembered and remote, like theirs of Troy,
Your sleep has been, nor can ye wake again
To any cry of joy;
Summers and snows have melted on the waves.
And past the noble silence of your graves
The merging waters narrow and deploy.
But not in vain, not all in vain, thank God;
All that you were and all you might have been
Was given to the cold effacing sod,
Unstrewn with garlands green;
The valour and the vision that were yours
Lie not with broken spears and fallen towers,
With glories perishable of all things seen.
Children of one dear land and every sea,
At last fulfilment comes--the night is o'er;
Now, as at Samothrace, swift Victory
Walks winged on the shore;
And England, deathless Mother of the dead,
Gathers, with lifted eyes and unbowed head,
Her silent sons into her arms once more.
Crowns and thrones have rocked and toppled of late, but our King and Queen, by their unsparing and unfaltering devotion to duty, by their simplicity of life and unerring instinct for saying and doing the right thing, have not only set a fine example, but strengthened their hold on the loyalty of all classes. And King Albert, who defied Germany at the outset, shared the dangers of his soldiers in retreat and disaster, and throughout the war proved an inspiration to his people, has been spared to lead them to victory and has gloriously come into his own again. His decision to resist Germany was perhaps the most heroic act of the War, and he has emerged from his tremendous ordeal with world-wide prestige and unabated distaste for the limelight. The liberation and resurrection of Belgium and Serbia have been two of the most splendid outcomes of the World War, as the débâcle in Russia and the martyrdom of Armenia have been its greatest tragedies.
Parliament has been seen at its best and worst. When the Prime Minister rose in the House on the afternoon of the 11th to announce the terms of the Armistice signed at 5 A.M. that morning, members from nearly all parts of the House rose to acclaim him. Even "the ranks of Tuscany" on the front Opposition bench joined in the general cheering. Only Mr. Dillon and his half-dozen supporters remained moody and silent, and when Mr. Speaker, in his gold-embroidered joy-robes, headed a great procession to St. Margaret's Church, and the ex-Premier and his successor--the man who drew the sword of Britain in the war for freedom and the man whose good fortune it has been to replace it in the sheath--fell in side by side, behind them walked the representatives of every party save one. Mr. Dillon and his associates had more urgent business in one of the side lobbies--to consider, perhaps, why Lord Grey of Falloden, in his eve-of-war speech, had referred to Ireland as "the one bright spot." This Irish aloofness is wondrously illustrated by the Sunday Independent of Dublin, which, in its issue of November 10, spoke of a racing event as the only redeeming feature of "an unutterably dull week." We have to thank Mr. Dillon, however, for unintentionally enlivening the dulness of the discussion on the relations of Lord Northcliffe to the Ministry of Information and his forecast of the peace terms. Mr. Baldwin, for the Government, while endeavouring to allay the curiosity of members, said that "Napoleons will be Napoleons." Mr. Dillon seemed to desire the appointment of a "Northcliffe Controller," but that is impracticable. All our bravest men are too busy to take on the job. Better still was the pointed query of Lord Henry Bentinck, "Is it not possible to take Lord Northcliffe a little too seriously?" But there are other problems to which the House has been addressing itself with a justifiable seriousness--and demobilisation, the shortage of food and coal, and the question how at the same time we are to provide for the outlay of coals of fire and feed the Huns and not the guns.
And how has England taken the news? In the main soberly and in a spirit of infinite thankfulness, though in too many thousands of homes the loss of our splendid, noble and gallant sons--alas! so often only sons--who made victory possible by the gift of their lives, has made rejoicing impossible for those who are left to mourn them. Yet there is consolation in the knowledge that if they had lived to extreme old age they could never have made a nobler thing of their lives. Shakespeare, who "has always been there before," wrote the epitaph of those who fell in France when he spoke of one who gave