DRUM-HEAD PARADE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 265, 9 November 1936, Page 6

DRUM-HEAD PARADE

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY! ‘ 1 DENUNCIATION OF WAR BISHOP HOLLAND’S VIEW “It is the business of the churche# to make my business impossible.” This quotation made by Lord Haig, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in France at the terminal bion of the Great War, when speaking to the Church of Scotland, wal used by the Bishop of Wellington, the Rt. Rev. St. Barbe Holland, M.A., addressing Returned Soldiers at a drumhead parade yesterday to mark the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice. The speaker dwelt on the horrors of war. He was there doing his bit a* a padre, trying to make life easier for those men who were butchering and being butchered in what was to be a. war to end war. The Armistice had been signed at 11 a.m. on that November day in 1918, and in the House of Commons that night the British Prime Minister had said: “This morning ended the Great War, and, we trust, by God’s grace, all wars.” Yet where was the world to-day? the speaker asked. Still building armaments. It is noticeable, he commented, that people were not celebrating Peace Day, but the signing of the Armistice. It would be found that the meaning of the world “armistice” was the cessation of arms for a short period, and it really looked as though that is what had been happening in the world—the cessation of hostilities for a time. “Yet I refuse to believe that this world is not) under the control of God, to whom war is abhorrent,” Bishop Holland continued. “But God gave to man free will and that free will gave men the possibility of making fools of themselves.” The speaker stressed that Lord Haig’s words revealed the Christian soldier. There was no finer Christian in the whole of the war, he said, than Lord Haig. “I cannot see any hop** for peace until men are living on a plane which makes war impossible,” Bishop Holland declared. “On the plane we are living to-day it is impossible to have peace. Only when we think well of each other, think as well of the yellow man in the East as the white man in New Zealand, as well of the child in the slums as our own children, only then will we have lasting peace. We must, live on a plane on which we have learned to put. self down.” The speaker could not see how any man who had been through war and understood its full meaning could look the world in the face Without humiliation. He urged men to accept the Cross and fight God's war for the betterment of the world, quoting Mr Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of Britain, from his address after the unveiling of the memorial to Canada's dead at Vimy Ridge: “If the world will not live the way of Life, then we deserve to perish.” A small attendance of returned men paraded in charge of Mr W. H. Cannan, president of the Wanganui Returned Soldiers’ Association. Headed by the Wanganui Garrison Band and behind a Union Jack, the parade marched to the Queen's Park Memorial and there solemnly laid a wreath of laurel in remembrance. A short service was conducted during which hymns were sung. Buglar Bogle played the “Last Post" and “Reveille" and the parade marched hack to the Drill Hail and dismissed. So was Armistice Sunday remembered in Wanganui. It is intended that returned men shall collect, at. the Post Office on Wednesday (the exact anniversary of lhe signing of the Armistice) at 11 a.m. Two minutes’ silence will be observed and the “Last Post” sounded.