BATTLE COMMEMORATION

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 49, 26 August 1922, Page 12

BATTLE COMMEMORATION

PRESIDENT HARDING AT "PRINCETON. It' is not often that the President of the United States leaves the beaten track to delve into military history of the revolutionary or any other wars. His epeech before Princeton University where he' received the honorary degree of Doctor of. Laws wag an occasion, however, when he could be forgiven for making patriotic utterances, worthy of the best traditions of Independence Day. Referring to the ceremony the corTespondent of the "London Daily Telegraph" at New York, aftfd the British General, Cornwallis, regarded the Princeton battle,as; the crowning glory of Washington's military, career, and the Univerr sity ceremonies on 10th June, beginning with the unveiling oi the monument -commemorating the battle, had distinctly ■ a martial flavour. Instead of the vusual Latin poem, Dr. Henry Vandyke, a graduate, declaimed a stirring ballad describing the Battle of Princeton, describing how : Cornwallifl watched his Trenton tr*p, And drained his glass and took nis nap; But the ragged troops of Washington - outflanked him in the night. Warming to his work, Dr. Vandyke showed how things looked "like hell" for the ragged Yankees : When down the hill from Tom Olark's house rode Washington aflame With holy ire, through smoke and fire, like mighty Mars he came. "Come on, my men, parade with me; we'll make" the braggart redcoats flee." ' And up the hill, against the guns, rod* Washington aflame. He turned the tide at Princeton; the land was saved at Princeton, And they-who fought and they who :.. f«ll won liberty; and f*m«. . . . President Harding'® tribute to the heroes of Princeton-did hot lag behind Dr. Vandyke's ballad, and he reached thd climax when he declared, amid the cheers of the assembled thousands, that "the real monument to the achievement of Washington's patript army in the Trenton-Princeton campaign is not in the workings of bronze or th» carving of etone; it rears itself in the initiations of liberty and representative Government;' now big in the vision of all mankind."