"When in conditions the hardest and the most unpromising, Australia and New Zealand came successively to the birth a century ago, as a living part of the British Empire, who would have dared to fashion in remotest vision the stern, yet romantic, story of 1915? The eager manhood of the young raw Commonwealth, the product of our own time, first carried with swift safety across the successive seas, then disciplined and prepared for action under the shadow of the world-old Pyramids, and then gaining their first experience of the shock of the onset within sight and hearing of the plains of Troy—an almost inconceivable intermingling of the old world and the new. The bare story is itself a stimulus and a reminder of what the lessons of history and the trust of Empire mean.
"God give us grace so to bear ourselves as a united people that we may be building out of this welter of fearful pain and strife the walls of His greater kingdom upon earth, the kingdom that is to endure: when the nations of the earth, and not least our own peoples—Britain and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and India—bring into it, each of them, their honour and their glory, the distinctive powers and blessings that God has given to each several one, to make glad the city of our God, the habitation of the Prince of Peace."
At the conclusion of the Archbishop's sermon the band of the Guards played the Dead March in "Saul"; the bugles rang out in the "Last Post," and the mourners reverently left the building. So London paid its tribute to Australasia's dead.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Australia, by Dr. Gilbert White, Bishop of Carpentaria.
THE SECOND DIVISION