BURIAL OF UNKNOWN WARRIOR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22563, 6 May 1935, Page 4

BURIAL OF UNKNOWN WARRIOR

The ceremony yesterday was the' most beautiful, the most touching, and t the most impressive that in all its long, eventful story this island has ever seen. It uttered in its Kublime simplicity the very heart of the whole people. Stately and solemn it was in form, with all the restrained and chastened splendour by which Church and State pay their last outward homage to the glorious dead, but the high thoughts and the deep emotions which these outward symbols strive to express were overpowered by the supreme feeling that here

was one of ourselves, one of the people, one of the hundreds of thousands of all sorts and of all conditions, who had laid down his life for us. That was the feeling uppermost in the minds of the vast multitude who watched the Unknown Warrior as he passed to his last home amid the reverent and prayerfuL silence of his fellow-subjects, and as he was laid to rest among the greatest of our race. Pity for this plain man who had done his full duty more than once filled the eyes of the onlookers with tears —an outbreak of emotion very rare with English crowds. But in every feature and in every detail this wonderful rite was so conceived and so executed as to move the deepest and the noblest of the sentiments common to ns all. From the most refined to the least instructed the appeal went home to all, and it is hard to say which it most profoundly stirred. The King was the chief. mourner; the pallbearers were the most famous our captains by sea and land and air; a hundred V.C.'s furnished the guard of honour—such a guard as no monarch ever had. When the coffin was rested before the Cenotaph and to the roll of the drums—the drums whose every beat recalls the terrors and the gallantry of Avar — and the notes of the brass, the choir raised the great hymn our people know and love, " 0 God, Our Help in Ages Past," many of those present were, too deeply moved to join. The Archbishop began the Lord's Prayer, which the King and all his subjects present repeated with uncovered heads. Then came the two minutes' silence, and in sharp contrast the ringing notes' of the " Last Post" The King laid a wreath before the Cenotaph, and the procession moved on to the Abbey. The service within, those hallowed walls bore the same character as the military ceremonial without. The glorious words of the Burial Service are always understanded of the people and always "loved by them. They were sung to the noblest music and spoken over the Unknown Warrior, but not over him only. Those who heard them felt that they were uttered also for all the hundreds of thousands, his comrades in death as in life, who rest in far-off graves from Flanders to Mesopotamia, or who sleep their last sleep beneath our guardian seas. Among the congregation prayed many of the bereaved. To them, above all others, the rite must have been trying and consoling. They saw their dearest honoured as no man has been honoured before, in the person of the unknown man who lay before them wrapped in that wonderful flag, "the Padre's Union Jack," the flag whose history is for ever interwoven with the deepest tragedies of the war. That emblem now covers the Unknown Warrior's grave in the Abbey; surely it should never leave those doubly venerable walls. On it lay another wreath from the King, with a brief but fitting inscription in memory of all who died unknown in the war. The coffin was lowered; the

last words were said; Mr Kipling's "Recessional," that great prayer of mingled thanksgiving, warning, and supplication, was sung; again there came the wonderful music of the drums, and the congregation'felt that the greatest service of their lives was done. "Lest we forget:" The words are ever seasonable, but at this moment they have a very special application. " To-day we honour the dead, let us not forget the living," Field-marshal Lord Haig wrote. He justly insists that our duty to the living is a part of what we owe to their dead comrades. One part of this debt we have now paid in symbols; we have still to complete payment of the other part in deeds. A quarter of a million of the comrades of the Unknown Warrior are still seeking' employment. Many of them have been crippled in the cause for which he gave his life. These men are not begging; they are asking for means to earn a living. They are asking that the sacrifices they have made fOr their country shall riot be their ruin. They are asking that promises lavished when their services were needed for our defence shall be made good now that these services are needed no longer. So long as any single ex-Service man, able to N work and willing to work, remains unemployed, the nation's debt of honour to its defenders will not be justly paid. —THE TIMES, November 12, 1920. Reprinted from 'Fleet Street." . ".'■