The Hawera Star. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1925. THE NATION REMEMBERS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 10 November 1925, Page 4

The Hawera Star.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1925. THE NATION REMEMBERS.

Delivered every evening by 5 o'clock in Hawera, Manaia, Norrnanby, Okaiawn, Eltham, Mangatoki, Kaponga, Alton, Hurleyville, Patea, Waverley, Mokoia, Whakamara, Ohangai, Merernere, Fraser Road, and Ararata.

Four years the war lasted, and it seemed nn agej seven years to-morrow since fighting ceased, and it seems but yesterday; so is time distorted by the tension under which wc live. Yet the seasons and the years roll on in their unchanging succession, and no man is permitted to lag behind. To-morrow the Empire will stand for a moment bare-headed and thoughts will go racing back over the past, over the sweets and bitters of the Terrible Years to some sacred memory in every life —a last farewell on a crowded railway < station, a tent-homo set in desert sands, a bursting shell in the next gully, a letter written only an hour before the barrage moved forward at dawn, a little headstone in a French cemetery. For some one picture, for others another—but all of them memories of days that are gone. l r et the silence of Armistice Day should do more than link us with the past, its triumphs and its sorrows. The whole story of the past, its spleudid example, all its sacrifices, challenges the present to ho worthy of the future. Mon went gladly to their death eight, nine, ten, eleven years ago, not for themselves but for those who should follow after. We are told, and most of us believe, that our civilisation and our culture would have gone to the wall hut for those who laid tlieir lives in its path. What have we done, what are we doing, to prove worthy of their sacrifices? It is right that we should remember them; but it is not Tight that we should be deaf to the appeal of their heroic example. If they died in vain, then was their death not glory but tragedy. It is for us to prove, by our answer to the challenge of the future, that they did not die in vain.