[ADDRESS AT A DEDICATION OF FLAGS]
Berlin, October 18, 1897
On this occasion sixty-three new flags were dedicated to the newly formed regiments of the guard, of the First to the Eleventh and of the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Army Corps. The Emperor and people celebrate this anniversary of the battle of Leipzig, 1813, with particularly patriotic demonstrations, and he almost invariably makes it the occasion for a military address. After the religious ceremony the Emperor addressed the following words to his troops:
The flags which have just now been consecrated before the altar of God and which have received His blessing I now turn over to the new regiments which spring from their old and proved predecessors in accordance with the custom of our army, which forever renews itself and its youth out of the ranks of its older and proved regiments. I do this in a hallowed place, before the statue of the great King and before the windows of the great Emperor. If the site is holy, so too is the day. It is the anniversary of the great victory after which the German people for the first time dared look forward in prospect to the dawn of coming union and the future greatness which was conditioned thereby. The day on which, for everlasting memory, the October fires leap from Germany’s hills is the birthday of the heroic first German Crown Prince and of the second German Emperor.[15]
[15] Frederick III.
Out of the old and proved regiments which he led to battle and victory the shoots have been taken for these new ones to which I now turn over their field insignia. May Almighty God, who has ever been so faithful and well intentioned to our Prussia and to the whole German Fatherland, help always to maintain the vows of the thousands of German youths who shall stream from the circles of the people to these new flags and who before them shall swear their oath of allegiance!
I hope that in these regiments the qualities of the great Emperor will live on—the absolutely unselfish devotion to the whole, the unreserved sacrifice of one’s own capacity, bodily as well as spiritual, for the honor of the army and for the safety of the beloved Fatherland. Then, I am convinced, will the foundations remain firm and intact in these new regiments, the foundations upon which the discipline of our army rests—bravery, sense of honor, and absolute and unconditional obedience.
This is my wish for the new regiments.