Even more wonderful was the defense of Ypres. There was a time in the first battle of Ypres when the British high command, denuded of shells, were allotting among their commands, then engaged in a life-and-death struggle, ammunition which had not yet left England. So terribly was the "first seven divisions" of glorious memory decimated in this first battle of Ypres, that at a critical time, the bakers, cobblers and grooms were put into the trenches to fill the gaps made by the slain soldiers in that great charnel house. The "thin red line" held back—not for days, but for weeks,—an immensely superior force, and the soldiers of England unflinchingly bared their breasts to the most destructive artillery-fire that the world at that time had ever known. They held their ground and saved the day, and the glory of the first and second battles of Ypres, which saved Calais, and possibly the war itself, will ever be that of the British Army.
Over four million Britons have volunteered in the war, and although very few of them had ever had an previous military experience, yet their stamina and unconquerable courage were such that the youth of the great Empire, on more than one occasion, when called upon, as on the Somme, to attack as well as defend, swept the famed Prussian guard out of seemingly impregnable positions, as for example at Contalmaison.
Will the world ever forget the children of the Mother Empire who came so freely and nobly from far distant Canada, who wrenched Vimy and Messines ridges from a powerful foe?
I hear still the tramp of marching thousands in the first days of the war, as they passed through the streets of Winchester en route to France via Southampton, singing with cheer and joy, "It is a long way to Tipperary." Alas! It is indeed a "long, long way," and many a gallant English boy has fallen in that way of glory.
To-day, from the Channel to the Vosges, there are hundreds of thousands of graves where British soldiers keep the ghostly bivouac of the dead. They gave their young lives on the soil of France to save France, and when the great result is finally accomplished, a grateful world will never forget that "fidelity even unto death" of the British soldier. Their place on Fame's eternal camping ground is sure.
What just man can fail to appreciate the work of the English sailor? It has been said by Lord Curzon, that never has an English mariner in this war refused to accept the arduous and most dangerous service of patrolling the great highways of the deep. No soldier can surpass in courage or fortitude the mine sweepers, who have braved the elemental forces of nature, and the most cruel forces of the Terror, which lurks under the seas.
The spirit of Nelson still inspires them, for every mariner of England has done his duty in this greatest crisis of the modern world.
And how can words pay due tribute to the work and sacrifices of the women and children of England? They have endured hardships with masculine strength, and have accepted irreparable sacrifices with infinite self-sacrifice.
When the three British cruisers were sunk early in the war by a single submarine, and many thousand British sailors perished, the news was conveyed to a seaport town in England, from which many of them had been recruited, by posting upon a screen the names of the pitifully few men who had survived that terrible disaster. Thousands of women, the wives and daughters of those who had perished, waited in the open square in the hope, in most cases in vain, to see the name of some one who was dear to them posted among the survivors; and yet when the last names of the rescued were finally posted, and thousands of English women, there assembled, realized that those who were nearest and dearest to them had perished beneath the waves, these women of England, instead of lamentations or tears, in the spirit of loftiest and most sacred patriotism united their voices and sang "Britannia Rules the Waves," and re-affirmed their belief that, notwithstanding all the powers of Hell, that "Britons never would be slaves."
Who shall then question England's right to a conspicuous place in this worldwide tournament of Fame? In all her past history, there has never been any page more glorious. Without her, as without France, civilization would have perished. To each nation be lasting honor!