THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1928. THE WAR MONUMENTS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20591, 14 December 1928, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1928. THE WAR MONUMENTS.

The action of the Queen in fulfilling, at such a time as this, an engagement to unveil a seamen's war memorial at Tower Hill, London, will appeal to the Empire at large as a striking example of the characteristic subordination by members of the Royal Family of their personal convenience and comfort to the public interest. Her Majesty has affectingly expressed her feeling of commiseration of the womankind of the Empire in the bereavements it suffered during the war. " Every man of our million dead," she has written, "may have been dearer than anything on earth to some one woman, and in every part of the Empire to-day are the women who go on living with wounds in their hearts that time cannot heal. I wish that my voice could reach each one of them with a word of loving sympathy." There is none among them, it may be confidently asserted, who would not express her own sympathy with her Majesty in her present experience of deep and painful anxiety, the strain of which did riot deter her from bravely performing an act of public duty. In commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Armistice The Times issued a special War Graves number. It is a most touching human document. Besides carrying the eloquent message from the Queen, from which we have quoted, and a powerful message also from the Prince of Wales, it conveys 'an adequate idea of the nature and extent of that Commission as far as possible to identify and give suitable burial to every one of the million dead who gave their lives on behalf of their Empire... The task was one which it was manifestly beyond human power and ability to accomplish in its entirety. Yet how nearly that ideal has been reached this special number conclusively shows. Appropriate acknowledgment is made of " the toil, the pertinacity, the ingenuity, the sense of honour with which the Commission has realised that ideal to an extent that must often have seemed beyond hope." In the fitting, and felicitous phrase coined by his Majesty the King,. the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. " Beyond the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through Eastern Europe in well nigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing over the holy Mount of Olives itsplf, to the farthest shores of the Indian and Pacific Oceans—from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk to the hidden wildernesses of East Africa." It is a striking feature of the remembrance—one that must commend itself as entirely wise—that there is no distinction of rank or race or creed. All arc equal in view of the service that was rendered by them. The Prince of Wales, president of the War Graves Commissiou, expressed the sentiment which dominated the work when he wrote: —"The debt is greater than we can ever pay, but we can\do our best to pay it, as far as we can in the way they would have wished." Figures are feeble IhiSgs by which to illustrate a theme that is so solemn, but, as quoted by the Prince of Wales, they possess a meed of dignity and appropriateness:—"ln France alone there are two thousand war cemeteries. In Belgium there are five hundred. All over the world and in many a remote island in mid-ocean, some of our dead lie, for a number of those who perished at sea were washed up on distant shores. So in many places they lie alone, a single grave at spots which wc regard as remote from any theatre of war—in Fiji, New Britain, the Philippines, the Leeward and Hawaiian Islands, in Guatemala, the Belgian Congo, and North Borneo, while in a single cemetery on what was the Western Front there arc close on 12,000 graves. But whether they lie solitary or in the company of their comrades, whether they fell by land or by sea, there is none that have not been treated by the Commission with the same reverence and tender care. Regardless of their rank, from what, ever portion of the Empire they came, the same type of headstone is over all. They lie side by side in similar graves. They gave their- lives in the service of the Empire; in that, as in death, all are equal."