A THREATENED ENGLAND

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue LXVIII, 15 October 1914, Page 2

A THREATENED ENGLAND

Mr G. R. Sims writes-as follows in the Referee on the haunting theme of a .threatened England: "Sometimes wlien the August days are fine and the fair country around me is basking in the sunshine, I lie on the grass and listen to the song of the birds and the hum of the insects, and I wonder if I am awake or dreaming. "The England that I have spent my life in, this peaceful, green old England, cannot surely have become a threatened England. I look out upon the green glory of the smiling land, and I cannot persuade myself that if aught should happen' to our Fleet the inviolate sea would be inviolate no more, that these smiling pastures would be trodden under the heels of a German horde, amid these green glades would glisten the helmets of the Kaiser's guards, and a German army would encamp in the shadow of the tree-crowned heiehts. "AN OLD MAN'S PRAYER. "God of my fathers, now x.'?e clay Draws near Avhen I rav,sb leave the j land Wherein I trod life's r/p-s-^rb way, I And leave my dear c\zs in Thy hand, Grant that mine eyes so soon to close May see, by Thy Almighty will, i The land I love by England « foes Unsullied still. ] "Soon must I pass to where dead ! Born of the soil I proudly trod \ Wait, where no tears, of grief tore shed, ; To greet.-me round the throne of God. ' Lord, let me pass behind the veil From that dear land they loved so well, tTneonquered still, and with no tale Of shame to tell.' "We are an island race, and reared in the sense of sea-girt security, I don't think we have even now quite realised t the events through which we are pass--ing. That the dream of our envious foes should ever be realised seems to us unthinkable.

"It is a long time since the Norman Conquest. . For nearly nine hundred years our shores have been unsullied by the conqueror's heel. "The Armada was a threat that ended only in inglorious disaster to the galleons of Spain, and now—No, because the lord of countless legions has lost his reason the foundations of the British Empire are not going to crumble in the dust before him."