Evening Post. SATURDAY, JULY 25, 1936. THE TORCHBEARERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 22, 25 July 1936, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JULY 25, 1936. THE TORCHBEARERS

It was a very happy idea of the Germans in organising the Olympic Games allotted to them this year to link this greatest recurrent alhletic festival of modern times with its famous archetype of the ancient world by the symbolic progress of a lighted torch, borne by relays of runners of seven nations, across Europe from Olympia to Berlin. The start was announced this week in a cable message from Athens, dated July 20, stating that "something of the spirit of the golden age of Greek culture was recaptured when the concentrated rays of the sun ignited the torch at Olympia," and that "twelve maidens, attired in the traditional athlete's short tunic carried the flame from which the first runner lighted his torch." Thus commenced the first stage of the long journey by which the light of old Olympia will be sped to Berlin to kindle there the Olympic fire which must burn throughout the Games. Several days have elapsed since then, and the flame must be well on its way, passing from torch to torch, unextinguished, as each runner completes his distance and lights the lamp of his successor, but there is no more news. It may be that the lurid glare of the tragic conflagration now raging in the storied land of the West, where the Greeks placed their Garden of Hesperides and the Pillars of Hercules, has so dazzled the eyes of the world that they do not see in Greece itself the flickering advance, over mountain and plain, of a flame that is no fiery cross of war, but an emblem of peace and good will. This procession of" torchlight— something very different from a torchlight procession—may well symbolise a movement both in time and space. The torch race itself, though never an event, so far as records show T, in the actual Olympic Games in all their twelve centuries of existence, was nevertheless a familiar part of religious festivals, possibly as old. Classic Greek literature has a number of references to it, and votive tablets and vases depict the torchbearers, so that, we know that they ran what would correspond to our modern relay race, though this is so recent an addition to athletic programmes

that its origin has been attributed in America, not to a revival of a classic contest, but, prosaically enough, to the Massachusetts firemen's "beanpot" race of a few generations ago. Such humble beginnings are not unique. Both tragedy and comedy in ancient Greece sprang from primitive forms in religious worship. Aristophanes, the greatest of Greek writers of comedy, has one passage in which a torchbearer in a race at the Panathenian festival is described as "slow, pale, and fat, running with his head down and being left behind. And the people at the gates fell to beating him and he, being beaten, fizzled a little, blew out the torch, and ran away." Even in this there is a link of common frail humanity, the "touch of nature" that "makes a

whole world kin" for all time. It is some consolation to supposedly degenerate modernity to be assured that the ancient Greeks were not all demi-gods, but that there were "slow, pale, fat" men among them. The light that is passing from Olympia to Berlin by the long line of torchbearers may be conceived also as the light of civilisation through the ages, passing from its source in I the City-States of Greece to the barbarous North. To the Greeks all outside the confines of Greece were barbarians, and "Hellenismos" was the process by which the culture- of Hellas spread abroad. .Olympia was a religious centre of Greece from the earliest times, and the home of an Amphictyony or federal league of City-States in the Peloponnese under religious sanction. These City-States of old Greece were almost constantly

at war with one another, just as the Maoris used to be in New Zealand, but in the month of the Olympic Games there was a cessation of all hostilities under a sacred armistice which it would be an offence against | the gods to break. Thus with the chain of torches carrying the Olympic flame goes not only the spirit of Greek civilisation, but the spirit of peace, precious, indeed, to a Europe trembling in fear of war. The course of the running flame will be over classic ground to Athens, the centre of Greek civilisation in its golden age, and the scene of the first revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, thence up through Delphi, where the sacred oracle enunciated enigmatic forecasts to the suppliant, and so by Thermopylae of Leonidas over the plains of Thessaly to Salonica, in ancient Macedonia, the home of Philip and his son Alexander the Great, who conquered Greece and the world by force of arms, but were in turn conquered by the spirit of Greece. The Olympic light ripples on, along its chain of linksmen, out of Greece and across Bulgaria, northward through Yugoslavia, all historio ground, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, until at last it enters

Germany, land of the Teutons, whom Greece never civilised nor Rome conquered, but who gave the world some of her greatest classic scholars and the very archaeologists, Winckelmann and Curtius, who excavated the site of ancient Olympia and confirmed history. In them Germany has a special link with Olympia and the Games.'

There is much in this ronianlic (lame-carrier action —no cruel "flammenwcrfer" tliis, but the gentle glow of peace—that inspires all that is best in mankind. Light is the symbol of the power of the mind, of learning and science, to illuminate the darkness of savagery, superstition, suspicion, and malevolence. "Lumen Accipc et Imperti" runs the motto of Wellington College, nobly appropriate for the generations of scholars •who "take the light and pass it on." So Plato saw it, in his "Laws," of the children who "like a torch hand on life from generation to generalion." Newbolt in his "Vitai Lampatla" gives the idea of the torch race a poetic form that will always appeal to youth. So the light of Olympia. Not all can go to Berlin in person, but they can follow the light in mind. To the three thousand youths of the seven nations who will transmit the light from torch to torch over all the twelve days run of 1827 miles from Olympia to Berlin their part in promoting the common Olympic ideal of nobility and chivalry in sport by this symbolic gesture of the eternal light will give a new outlook towards their fellows in other lands and an imperishable memory. They are to count as athletes who took part in the Xllh Olympiad, and it may be that generations to come will regard their part in the festival as the greatest event of all and a most signal service to mankind. The original plan called for something more on which the cable news is so far silent. This was that an olive branch should also be brought from Olympia to Berlin, placed in a quiver which each runner would carry on his back, and pass on to the man taking over. It would add to the satisfaction of the world, and particularly of troubled Europe, if this symbol of peace were added to the liglit that is to shine over the festival at Berlin and confirm the sacred armistice traditionally associated with the month of the Olympic Games.