NOT MADE IN VAIN

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 184, 5 August 1940, Page 7

NOT MADE IN VAIN

PAST SACRIFICES. "Rid World Of A Scourge" Is Dedication. VISCOUNT GORT BROADCASTS. British Official Wireless. (Received noon.) RUGBY, August 4. General the Viscount Gort, V.C., Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, broadcasting to the Empire, said: "It has been my good fortune to fight alongside two generations of soldiers, and, from what I have seen during the past months, I know that the younger generation is brimful of courage and is ready to sacrifice all for the great cause for which we are fighting. "We older soldiers, veterans of the last war, are proud to be in the ranks with these sons of Britain, and on this anniversary our memories carry us back to the last war. Our thoughts turn to our brothers who lie buried, but not forgotten, in Flanders fields. "With war once more in our midst, we not unnaturally aek ourselves whether the men who died in those never-to-be-forgotten years, together with those who have fallen in the present war, have given their lives in vain. I find comfort in the words of Abraham Lincoln, 'Wβ here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom., "If the lamps of freedom have been extinguished by Nazi Germany, and by Fascist Italy, it is by the inspiration of the sacrifice of our old comrades that we shall relight them, and yet we may be thankful that they have been spared the sight of horrors far greater than those we witnessed in 1914," Viscount Gort continued. Savagery of Total War. "Never shall I forget the savagery of total war which heralded the arrival in Western Europe of this new and revised version of the German doctrine that Might is Right—the pitiable terror of men and women in Belgium and Northern France, the ruining of many of them for the second time in their lives, rendering them homeless and penniless before the invader. "What a cruel fate to see towns and villages which had been so laboriously rebuilt after the last war once again reduced to heaps of ruins! And to what purpose —to impose by force on free peoples, a creed abhorrent to them, and to satisfy the lust for domination of one man to whom the text: 'Love thy neighbour as thyself is meaningless. "Strong, therefore, in eupport of our faith and of that armour of the God of which St. Paul speaks, we dedicate ourselves anew to this crusade which shall rid the world of a scourge," he added. "In this spirit, let us all go forward together."