LAMPS OF FREEDOM

Grey River Argus, 6 August 1940, Page 6

LAMPS OF FREEDOM

“WE SHALL RELIGHT THEM s’’ 5 ’’ Lord Gorfs Faith [British Official Wireless] RUGBY, August 4. Lord Gort broadcasting, said: “It has been my fortune to light 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 sens of Britain, and, om 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 ask our-| selves whether those 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. ‘We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, and that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.’

“If the lamps of freedom have bee. i extinguished by Nazi Germany amt 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. Never shall I forget the savagery of the 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 ruining many of them for the second time in their lives, and rendering them homeless and penniless before the invader. And 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 sat-j isfy the lust for domination of one man, to whom the text. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ is meaningless.' “Strong, therefore, in support of our faith and of that armour of God of which St. Paul speaks, we dedicate. ourselves anew to this crusade, which shall rid the world of a scourge. In this spirit, let us all go forward together.” '