The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 1936. THE KING AT SKYROS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 205, 29 August 1936, Page 8

The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 1936. THE KING AT SKYROS.

For the cause that lackp assistance, For the tcrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that toe can do.

Those people Avho like to recall the emotion evoked by the publication in 1915 of a slim book of poems will have read with .delight and gratitude tlie news that King Edward, in the course of his holiday cruise in Greek waters, made a pilgrimage to the island of Skyros, to the grave of Rupert Brooke. It was an action such as we have long learned to expect from him who, though King, is still, in the first thought of many, the Prince of Wales, who for a post-war decade was for the whole world the symbol of the finest youth of England. On Skyros this week the King stood before the grave of one of whom it was said that he struck a note "more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in war than any other." In his poems there is preserved that spirit of exulting self-sacrifice which fired many young Englishmen in the first months of the war, a spirit in strong contrast with the feeling of disenchantment, of disillusion, of frustration, which came in later years over men condemned to go on fighting in the mud of Flanders.

The King, too, shared tliat early spirit. Though but 20 years of age at the outbreak of war, and as Heir to the Throne much less free than other men to follow liis inclination, he, like King Henry, thought himself accursed if he was not there, and soon, overcoming official obstacles, he went there. Rupert Brooke, who had been granted a commission in the Royal Naval Division, with which he took part in the Antwerp Expedition, later sailed with that division for the Mediterranean. He died at Skyros on April 23, 1915, two days before the landing in which, but for the illness which ended his life, he would have played his part. Perhaps through his death an immortal campaign was not immortalised in poetry. Who can doubt that the classical setting of the Peninsula, the sustained heroism of the fighting and its final outcome — "the story itself has the perfection of form of a Greek tragedy"—would have acted irresistibly upon his poetic imagination?

As the King shared the early exultant spirit of the men of his generation, so did he become aware of the later feeling of which Rupert Brooke knew nothing. On his pilgrimage he could recall the days when "all the air was ringing with rousing assurances. France to be saved, Belgium righted, freedom and civilisation re-'won, a sour, soiled, crooked old .world to be rid of bullies and crooks and reclaimed for straightness, decency, good nature, the ways of common men dealing with common men." And he could in retrospect live again through all that has .happened since. The vision faded; it has never been re-caught. But it has been remembered, and by none more clearly than by the King. He knew the things for which men fought, he has not forgotten them, and he has not allowed England to forget. Repeatedly —and sometimes .to the discomfiture of the politicians—he has reminded his countrymen that the soldiers were promised, among other things, a better England, "a land fit for heroes to live in," and he has given fresh impetus to the efforts to fulfil that promise. s