Listen! Here is something of what Australia has paid. There has never been a day for three years that hundreds of Australian wives have not been made widows. There has not been a single week that there has not been more than a full page of casualties in our daily papers. Every woman in Australia if she has not seen there the name of her near kin has seen the name of some one that she knows. I know a father and five sons that have all been killed. Within fifty miles of one town that I know there is not a man under fifty years of age. There are ranches and farms that will go back to the primeval wilderness, the fences will rot and fall down, and the rabbits and kangaroos will overrun them again, because the men who were developing them are gone and there are none to take their places. Never was there a country so starved for men, and sixty thousand are gone forever or maimed for life. Tell me, where are we going to replace these men? No country in the world could so ill afford to lose its young men, the future fathers of the race, for we have still our pioneering to do, a continent larger than the United States, with about the population of New York.
Outside our Australian cities there are some large cemeteries, as we mostly have only one for each city, but the largest of our cemeteries does not lie on Australian soil. There are more Australian dead buried in Egypt than in any cemetery in our own country. On Gallipoli, in enemy hands, are the graves of thousands of our sacred dead. There are more of our unburied dead whitening in No Man's Land in France than have ever been laid to rest by reverent hands in a God's acre at home. Think of all that we have paid in blood and tears and heartache. But, perhaps, more than this has been paid in pain and sweat. Many have been in those trenches more than three years. Consider their sufferings! The unnatural life, like rats in a hole, the nerve-strain, the insufficient food, the scanty clothing. What we have paid, Canada has paid, South Africa has paid, but Britain and France, how much more! And Belgium, and Serbia, and Poland, and Rumania, and Italy. What a price to pay for an insecure peace, an enemy still with power to harm.
We might erect to our fallen dead the most magnificent monument that this world has ever seen, we might built it in marble, and stud it with gems, and have the greatest poets and artists decorate it, but it would be a mockery and a sham.
The only monument that we dare erect to our fallen dead, the only monument that would not be a dishonor to them and a shame and eternal disgrace to us is THE MONUMENT OF VICTORY.
And the army will never quit until we have sure victory, for we dare not break faith with our dead.
These lines of a Canadian soldier, Colonel McCrae, who has made the last sacrifice are an epitome of the army's spirit:
"In Flanders' fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place,
While in the sky the larks,
Still bravely singing,
Fly unheard amid the guns.
We are the Dead—
Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow,
Loved and were loved—and now we lie
In Flanders' fields——
Take up our quarrel with the foe.
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch—be yours to bear it high—
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep though poppies grow
In Flanders' fields."