HL Deb 06 August 1919 vol 36 cc463-90

EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON rose to move—

That the thanks of this House be accorded to the Officers, Petty Officers, Warrant Officers and men of the Navy and of the Royal Marines for their sleepless watch over the seas and for the courage, resource and devotion with which, during four years of constant peril, they have maintained the blockade of the enemy's coast, convoyed armies drawn from the most distant lands, and defended the commerce of the civilised world against the craft and subtlety of a lawless foe.

That the thanks of this House be accorded to the Officers, Non-Commissioned Officers, Warrant Officers and men of the. Armies in the Field for the matchless valour and endurance with which, amid circumstances of unexampled hardship, they have sustained the shock of war in many climes, for the good humour, clemency and patience of their bearing, and for the undaunted spirit which has carried them through four years of strenuous toil to a complete and splendid victory.

That the thanks of this House be accorded to the Officers, Non-Commissioned Officers and men of the Air Force for their brilliant daring and conspicuous services over sea and land.

That the thanks of this House be accorded to the gallant troops from the Dominions Overseas, from India, and from the Colonies and Protectorates for the promptitude with which they responded to the call of justice and freedom and for the noble part that they have played in conjunction with their comrades of the British Isles in securing the triumph of right over wrong.

That the thanks of this House be accorded to those subjects of His Majesty, who, inspired by the greatness of the issue, voyaged from foreign lands, to offer their lives in the service of their country.

That the thanks of this House be accorded to the members of the Royal Army Medical Corps and of the Indian Medical Service, for the skilful discharge of their humane office, and for the unprecedented success which attended their unremitting labours to preserve the armed forces of the Crown from the ravages of disease.

That the thanks of this House be accorded to the women of the Medical and other Auxiliary Services for their devotion in tending the sick and wounded and for ether duties faithfully and bravely discharged.

That the thanks of this House be accorded to the Officers and men of the Mercantile Marine for the fine and fearless seamanship by which our People have been preserved from want and our Cause from disaster.

That this House doth acknowledge with deep submission and reverence the heroism of those who have fallen in the service of their Country and tenders its sympathy to their relatives in the hour of their sorrow and their pride.

The noble Earl said: I ask the indulgence of your Lordships if, owing to an indisposition from which I have barely recovered, I am unequal to-day to the task of doing justice to the great theme which has been placed in my hands. The Motion that I have the honour to move is one conveying the thanks of this House of Parliament to the brave men in every branch of the Forces to whose valour, fortitude, and devotion we owe it that we have won the greatest victory that has ever been recorded in the annals of the British nation. The records of Parliament show that it has been for long past, I think for centuries past, the custom of both Houses of Parliament, in the concluding stages of a great national struggle, to offer a vote of congratulation and of thanks to those brave men who have upheld the honour, maintained the welfare, and added to the glory of the nation. This is, as I say, a time-honoured, but it is also, in my opinion, a praiseworthy practice. For, although we are essentially a peace-loving people, and although assuredly we did nothing, either by policy or by action, to provoke this particular war, yet when the lists are arrayed it is upon the valour of our soldiers and sailors, upon the skill of the Generals and Admirals who lead them, far more than upon any diplomacy of Statesmen, that we rely. Hence it is that upon these occasions the thanks of Parliament are given exclusively to those who have risked so much, who have in the majority of cases risked and in many cases laid down their lives, and to whose courage and genius we owe it that the victory which we celebrate has been won.

No one would wish to have it otherwise. If we are wrong in hoping that this will be the end of all great wars, and if another war should—let us hope not in our lifetime—break out in Europe, I doubt not that the same custom will be followed in your Lordships' House at its close. If, on the other hand, we succeed in abolishing war and no such occasion arises, then it may be that the time will come for the statesman, and a day may arise when a vote of thanks will be moved in this House, not to members of His Majesty's Government—that is a privilege which we seldom enjoy—but to the members of the League of Nations, who by their action may possibly have prevented the recurrence of such a catastrophe. Further, I venture to think that this form of tribute—the thanks of Parliament; which, after all, represents the organised sentiment of the nation—is more valued by its recipients than the loudest acclamations that they may get from the populace or the highest honours which it is in the power of Governments or of the Crown to bestow. I believe that the recipients of this compliment would sooner have it than the grants of money which are about to be conferred upon them, or than the coronets which in some cases are about to adorn their brows. As to the moment at which I make this Motion, it is true that peace has not been concluded with all our enemies, but the principal enemy, the most formidable of our antagonists, has been humbled and broken, and it was, I think, with a true instinct that as soon as the German signatures were placed upon the Treaty of Versailles the country—and not this country alone, but Europe—realised that the war was over and that the victory had been won.

This Resolution specifies all the Forces of the Crown, to whom we ask you to-day to express your thanks. In succeeding paragraphs you will find mentioned the Navy and the Royal Marines; the Armies in the Field; the Air Force; the troops from the Dominions overseas, from India and from the Colonies and Protectorates—those subjects of His Majesty who have come over to fight from foreign lands; the members of the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Indian Medical Service, the women of the Medical and other Auxiliary services, and the officers and men of the Mercantile Marine. But while I have briefly enumerated this list of those whom we desire to honour, I think that I shall be dispensed this afternoon from recording with any minuteness the individual services or exploits of these Forces. I think so for two reasons. Firstly, because they are already so well known that were I to recapitulate them this afternoon I should be merely re-telling an oft-told tale; and secondly, because in October, 1917, at the beginning of the fourth year of the war; I proposed at this Table an interim vote of thanks to all those branches of the Services, and I dwelt at some length on that occasion on the records of each of those branches. The year that elapsed between that date and the conclusion of the Armistice in November, 1918, did but consummate their triumph; it could add nothing to their glory. It was a year more dramatic than any that had preceded it in the war. It was, perhaps, the most dramatic twelve months that have ever passed in the history of the world. It opened, as your Lordships will remember, with reverses that seemed almost to threaten the possible victory of our cause, but it ended with a victory so complete that there is nothing comparable to it in history. It was a victory that has altered the entire course of the history of the world, that has reconstructed the map of the world, and that has left. us with a future differing in all essentials—I hope it may differ in the beneficial results that ensue from it—from any victory by which it has been preceded.

It is surely not an unhappy coincidence that I should be making this Motion to-day, almost on the exact anniversary of the day five years ago on which we entered the war. None of us will forget that day. We recall the intense excitement, the pent-up emotion, the patriotic exaltation of the people. I can hear and see now, in memory, the crowds that surged past my window in the evening proceeding along the streets to acclaim the Sovereign in his palace. They went there to cheer him as the symbol and embodiment of the ideals and the aspirations of the people. That, if I may say so, was no feverish or artificial or ephemeral outburst; it was an expression of the profound conviction of our people. The whole country realised almost in a flash that this was a just, a necessary, an inevitable, and a righteous war—a war from which we could not have abstained except at the price of national dishonour. There were few of the people in the streets that day I expect, and I dare say there were few of us, who realised what lay before us—the long and agonising ordeal to be endured, the dark valleys of anguish and suffering through which our people must plod and stumble for more than four years before they could scale the peaks of hope or see the dawn of victory flood the hills. But such was the spirit of our people, so imbued were they with the importance of the issue, such was their confidence in the indomitable heroism of our troops, that, had the curtain been lifted that day and had our eyes been able to, penetrate the dark and sombre gulfs that lay before us, I believe that no class and no individual in any class, would have faltered; that no parent would have refused to send forth his son to the ordeal, and that no man, upon whose brow was written in unseen characters the death sentence that was about to await him, would have shrunk or trembled at the impending decree of fate. Now five years have past. We see the same crowds—or, rather, they are not the same crowds; there are many gaps in their ranks—but we see the crowds parading the streets, we see them again massing in front of the palace and acclaiming the Sovereign, and we are met this afternoon to add our crown of tribute to that which has been already offered by the nation.

The character and value of the services which we commemorate to-day may, I think, best be measured by a contemplation of the nature of the struggle through which we have passed. It is a commonplace to say that this has been no ordinary war. It is not a war upon which oblivion will presently lay its chilly hand and which will speedily pass into the limbo of the forgotten, to be explored only by the military student or to be annotated by the historian of the future. It is a war that has been waged for four years with unparalleled intensity, without a respite, without any intervals of repose, without any of those retreats into winter quarters which we used to read of in histories of the Peninsular and other campaigns more than a century ago. It is a war which has been waged not in a single theatre or in a single continent; it has been waged in every continent on the surface of the globe except that of America, and, unable to fight in their own continent, the Americans had to come over to conduct the struggle in ours. It has been fought upon every sea. One of the most memorable incidents in the early stages of the war occurred in the seas that surround the Australian continent. Two of the most famous engagements—that of Coronel and the Falkland Islands—were fought in the waters that lie on either side of the Horn. It has not been a war as many have been—of two countries or of two peoples; it has been a war in which scores of countries and countless peoples have been engaged.

I imagine, my Lords, that a larger number of men have been under arms in this war than in all the accumulated wars of the past, century, and I dare say much longer. I hesitate to estimate the number of men who, directly or indirectly, have been engaged in fighting this war, but perhaps we may form some dim estimate of it if I say, as I believe to be true, that in the course of it something like 20,000,000 human beings in different parts of the world have laid down their lives. Again, this war has been famous for the revolutions which it has introduced into the science and practice of warfare, for the development that we have seen in the arts both of assault and of defence, in the new principles of strategy and tactics that have been evolved, in the devilish instruments and agencies of war that have been created, in the fearful devastation which has been wrought, and in the inconceivable destruction which the armies have left behind them. It is the first great war that has been fought both in the air and under the seas. I cannot help thinking that when history records its impartial verdict these scenes it will also say that it was war notable for the calculated and inconceivable savagery of one of the combatants, who had not even the excuse of the medieval barbarian for his crimes, because he claimed himself to be the finest creature of providence, the finished product of culture and civilisation, and the predestined master of the world.

All these aspects of the war which I have briefly touched upon seem to me to throw into startling relief, and to invest with an exceptional lustre, the services of those who fought and won it. If passing from that field of obervation we look at the war for a moment in the way in which it has affected ourselves in this country, I think we may claim that it has been equally unprecedented and equally remarkable. It is the first war in our history that has been waged, not by a professional class of soldiers appointed and paid for the purpose, but by the whole nation. There is not a class or community, or section of a class or community, there is not a trade or occupation in the country that has not been involved—men and women, even boys running away from our Universities, falsifying their ages in order to escape from our public schools in order that they might not be missing when the great trial came—all have been imbued with the same ardour and all were equally convinced of the righteousness of our cause.

There is one other sharp distinction between this war and previous wars, some of them within our own recollection. On some of those occasions there have been sharp differences of opinion at home among ourselves as to the policy or as to the conduct of the war. Such was the case to some extent with certain phases of the Napoleonic Wars. It was more the case with regard to the Crimean War, and still more, again, with regard to the South African War—in the recollection of so ninny of us who now have seats in this House. In the case of those wars, my Lords, to a greater or less degree, at certain times and dates the nation was divided, grave dissensions occurred, party spirit was aroused, and charges were hurled to and fro from one side to the other of the House of Commons. But here there has been no discordant note. The country has been unanimous. The feeble twitterings of the pacifists have been drowned in the great chorus of national approval, and although we have been told by a famous man that this country hates Coalitions—and I am not certain that sometimes it is not true—yet the measure of the national agreement has been typified by the fact that for four years and a quarter you have had a Government administering the country which is composed of representatives of all parties in the State.

There is another test that I would apply. I suggest that really the best evidence of the general concord of which I speak has been the readiness with which, after the first year and a half of war, compulsory service was accepted in this country. It was not because the people had abjured the voluntary system. We all of us see how eagerly they are endeavouring to get back to it. It was not because they liked compulsory military service for its own sake, but it was because they recognised and accepted it as an overwhelming necessity in this case. I believe myself that the country was converted and convinced in this respect before Parliament. There were some of us who from the start pleaded for the introduction of compulsory service, not merely as a sound principle, not even merely as a national duty, but as a military necessity without which a war on this scale could not be fought or won. When, however, the plunge was taken, I ask you to recall how admirable was the spirit in which it was accepted by the nation as a whole. None of those gloomy forebodings to which we listened from the prophets of evil was found to be true; none of those invidious distinctions were drawn between the voluntary soldier and the soldier who came in under the Military Service Acts. Both were inspired by the same devotion and sense of duty, and now that the war is over both classes can look back with equal pride and without any distinction upon the part which they played in the struggle.

There is one feature, too frequently, I think, ignored, which I would like to mention in estimating the services of the men whom we are here to-day to honour. Every British soldier and airman who has been fighting in this war, with the exception of those brave heroes of the air who were defending us from aerial attack in this country, has been fighting throughout on a foreign soil. There has been wanting to him the stimulus of the knowledge that the frontiers of his country had been violated; that the territories of his people had been over-run; that his home had been broken up; that his family had been taken off into slavery, even if it had not suffered a worse fate. Such has not been the case of our Allies. In Belgium the brave Belgian people, fighting in the little corner of their country that was left to them, could see daily before their eyes the smoking débris of the territories from which they had been evicted; France could see, within a few miles of her front, the ruins of her fairest fields and her richest factories; the Italians, looking forth, could see the enemy from the towers of Venice. Our soldiers had no such incentive. They were fighting throughout in foreign lands, amid a foreign people speaking a different tongue from their own. Now, it was the trenches of France and Flanders; anon, it was the murderous slopes of Gallipoli; yet again, it was the hills of Palestine, or, it might be, the banks of the Tigris. But in all those distant places, in every variety of climate, exposed to every sort of privation, our men fought with as much ardour as though they were fighting on, behind, and for the shores of Great Britain. I have sometimes wondered in my own mind, though I have hardly dared to confess the sentiment, whether the gallant troops of our Allies would have fought with equal spirit, so cheerfully and for so long a time as they did had they been engaged in the High- lands of Scotland or on the marches of the Welsh border.

The first of these paragraphs relates to the services of the Navy, and if I turn to that subject it is, I am sure, unnecessary for me to recall in any detail the great deeds or surpassing services which have been rendered in this war by the Navy, including the mercantile marine. If the statement might challenge criticism—though I have heard it made—that it was the British Navy which won the war, certainly no one would dispute the proposition that without the British Navy it could not possibly have been won: I do not propose to recall this afternoon the exploits on the sea of the past four years—Beatty's famous dash into the Heligoland Bight, his frustrated victory on the Dogger Bank, Jellicoe's and Beatty's great naval battle of Jutland, de Robeck's landing in the Dardanelles, the heroic disaster of Coronel, the swift retribution of the Falkland Islands, the glorious and immortal exploits of Zeebrugge and Ostend. The heroes of these combats are mentioned in the Message which will shortly come before us from His Majesty the King. One of them, Lord Jellicoe, has already a seat in your Lordships' House; the other, Sir David Beatty, will shortly follow him.

I prefer for the moment, in the few remarks that I devote to the subject, to look at the services of the Navy, not from the individual but from the widest point of view. There has never been so supreme a manifestation of what is meant by sea power in the history of the world. There have never been results so tremendous that flowed from the command of the sea. I ask you for a moment to reflect what the command of the seas has meant to us and our Allies. From the beginning of the war the merchant fleet of these world-conquerors was doomed either to capture or to internment in a neutral port, or to lie helplessly and uselessly in its own harbours. With one exception, the fighting Navy of Germany feared to meet in action the British Flea, and that experiment was never repeated. Not a single transport containing German troops ever crossed the sea. Not a single German soldier landed on our coast, except as a prisoner; and perhaps we had too many in that category. Not a single German warship came in sight of our shores except to fire a few shells upon unoffending and, as a rule, sleeping seaside towns, and only came in order to scuttle away the moment there was a chance either of engagement or of pursuit. Germany had to look on in helpless impotence while the whole of her colonial empire was wrested from her. Not a regiment, not a squadron, not a platoon, not a gun could be moved from Germany to rescue any one of these possessions upon which hundreds of millions of pounds had been spent. A degree of immunity unparalleled in the history of naval warfare against hostile vessels navigating the surface of the ocean was given to the merchantmen of our Allies, and, if the submarine menace could not be wholly guarded against, it was one which, as time went on, we had learned to master and which we managed to defeat.

Your Lordships may expect me to allude, in passing, to the fact—which I will not develop only because it is so notorious—that during the five years of war it was the British Fleet, that transported the armies of Britain and of the Allies to every theatre of war, carrying no fewer than 20,000,000 of men to and fro, with a loss from enemy action of only 4.400 out of that number, carrying in the same period 2.000,000 horses and mules, and conveying not less than 50.000,000 tons of food and other materials in British ships to British shores.

But there are three less advertised services of the Navy to which I would like to devote a sentence. The first is the ceaseless watch which was kept by the. British Fleet over those 140,000 square miles of the Northern Sea, a watch pursued by day and night, in fair weather and in foul, in fog and mist, for over four and a-half years. The patrol boats and destroyers and mine-sweepers with which we conducted that operation were only twelve in number in 1914; when the Armistice was concluded there were 3,700 engaged in that task. I ask your assent when I say that this was one of the greatest and most sustained and most heroic feats of endurance in the history of naval warfare. The second service was the sentinel watch kept by the Grand Fleet in Scapa Flow, a post of incessant and almost incalculable danger. Had the German Fleet possessed a Jellicoe or a Beatty it is scarcely conceivable that they would not have attacked that most vulnerable position by night. That, I believe, is the opinion of Lord. Jellicoe himself. All honour to the brave men who held that post, and who, when they sallied forth to fight, only did not carry their fight to complete victory because the enemy would not allow them to finish it. The third feature to which I allude was the development of the system of convoys, by which entire fleets of merchantmen were escorted over thousands of miles of ocean, guarded against the perils that lurked below the sea, and without which the American Expeditionary. Force could not possibly have reached the shores of France.

Such have been, in brief, the exploits of the British Navy. It is an incomparable record. It includes, of course, the services of the mercantile marine which has been frequently acknowledged in this House, and to which the citizens of London paid their great tribute in the procession which we witnessed from these windows two days ago. As regards the mercantile marine, I cannot sum up their services better than in this single sentence—that not once in the war did a crew or any individual member of a crew that had once been torpedoed refuse to join another vessel and continue to fight when the chance came of doing so. That gives you some idea of the spirit and daring with which that body discharged their account.

The next paragraph in the Resolution is devoted to the deeds of the Army in the field. It seems almost laughable to attempt to do justice to the feats of the Army in a paragraph. It would be impossible to comprise them within time limits of a few sentences in a speech. I have no time this afternoon to tell the story of battles which will be immortal to all time. I cannot talk to-day about Mons, about Ypres, about the Marne and the Somme, about the slopes of Achi Baba, or about the beleaguered garrison of Kut. I cannot recall to-day the wonderful feats of Lord French and Sir Douglas Haig and the other Commanders. I cannot take you to Palestine or give you a bird's-eye view of what I believe, on the whole, was the most artistically conceived and executed little campaign that has ever been waged. Still less can I repeat the countless tales of bravery everywhere that seem to have transcended human experience and human powers. The records of the Victory Cross, many hundreds of which have been pinned on the bosoms of those who won them, tell the tale.

But there is one feature of the British Army in fighting to which I must allude and that is the chivalry, the humanity, and the high bearing in every field of battle of the British soldier. The paragraph of the Resolution which refers thereto speaks of the good-humour, the clemency, and the patience of their bearing. I think those words, if anything, fall short of the reality. In face of the awful provocation which they experienced, with every incentive to inflict a speedy and bloody retribution on the enemy, the British soldier and sailor—what I say applies equally to both—rarely lost his temper, and never lost his head. They exhibited an example of self-restraint, moderation, and mercy in face of the brutal and pitiless conduct of the enemy which has never been equalled, and which has cast an imperishable lustre not merely on the. British Army and Navy but on the British name.

In this war over 5,000,000 men were recruited from the British Isles; the largest proportion of them from England. Of those, 720,000 have laid down their lives and nearly 3,000,000 bore, at one time or another, upon their body the glorious evidence of honourable wounds. And let us remember this—that just as the old Expeditionary Force of 100,000 men which left our shores in the first week of August, 1914, was, I believe, the finest force that ever left these shores, so we are told, on the indisputable evidence of all military critics, that the Army, approximating to 4,000,000 men, which remained at the conclusion of the Armistice was by far the most efficient fighting force this country, or any country, has ever beheld.

Six of the Generals who were engaged in winning this great struggle are about to join, by the favour of the Sovereign, Your Lordships' House. You will welcome them here. One, outside the six—Viscount French—is already here. His was the Army of the "Old Contemptibles"; his was the glory of the Marne and of Ypres; his the splendour that can never fade. Soon we shall have another place on these Benches occupied by his successor, Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, a model, if I may say so, of what a British Commander should be—a man devoted to his profession, never thinking of himself, with a mind open to the broadest conceptions as well as to the narrowest details of war; always equable, courteous, resolute, and calm. No Commander ever so well typified the qualities of the soldiers he led, and no Commander in this war could have worked so loyally with the great Field-Marshal who was placed above him.

There is one paragraph of this Motion which relates to the services of the Dominions, of India, and the Crown Colonies. It is not for the first time in recent history that they have come to our aid. The Indian Army for half a century at least has been fighting our battles in almost every portion of the Asiatic and African Continents. We recall how the Forces of Canada. New Zealand, and Australia came to our aid in South Africa and on the Nile. But never before have we seen these countries converted, as they have been through this war, into great armed camps, enforcing in some cases compulsory service on their people, treating the struggle as though it was—which, of course, in the last resort it was—a struggle which affected their own existence and their own homes; crossing thousands of miles of sea, feeding the Forces in Europe with recruits month after month and year after year, accepting for years separation from their homes and families, performing prodigies of valour in action, and leaving thousands of men to sleep in foreign graves. The deeds which the Dominion troops wrought in France, in Gallipoli, and many other places which I could mention, are already a national epic which will be enshrined in the glories of our race. The 460,000 who came from Canada the 400,000 who came from Australia, the 112,000 from New Zealand, and the 76,000 from South Africa, meant much more than the numeral strength of the million which these figures when added together compose. They were a moral asset which it was impossible to estimate or over-estimate, and which left an indelible impression on the conscience of the world. I may say the same of India. When we remember that India during this war has raised 1,300,000 native troops, of whom nearly 1,000,000 crossed the seas, it cannot be said that she did not prove her loyalty or play her part. The Indian troops, as we remember, arrived in France almost in the nick of time. They bore the brunt of fighting, in a trying climate, at a critical occasion. Without them some of our greatest victories would not have been won, and the incidents of which we were witness in the streets of London a few days ago are a sufficient evidence that this country knows and appreciates that fact.

Neither, my Lords, might we to forget the services of the Crown Colonies and Protectorates. They came from East and West Africa, from the West Indies and the Straits Settlements, from the Pacific Islands to Cyprus, and from Bermuda to Wai-Hei-Wai, and where they could not find troops for fighting they found carriers and labour battalions to go to the front; while the white colonists, where they could, sent contingents and where they could not, sent sums of money, raised loans or defrayed the cost of local services. Not inferior services were rendered by those mentioned in one of the paragraphs of the Motion—namely, the men who from all quarters of the world, subjects of the King living in foreign countries, remembered the call of blood and voyaged here in great numbers voluntarily to offer themselves and their lives in the service of their country.

Among those whom this House, upon the gracious initiative of the Sovereign, will I, asked to honour with a money grant, is General Trenchard. That officer is an embodiment of the fighting force and spirit of that glorious force which he led at different times at home and in the field. In his person the entire force is honoured. When we recall the tiny flotilla which flew across the Channel in the first week of August, 1914, and when we remember that at that time the two forces into which it was then divided—the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service—numbered only between them 1,000 officers and men, and not much more than 100 machines, and when we compare these exiguous totals with the vast fleet of aircraft of every description which we now possess, with the enormous Army, numbering tens of thousands of men, who now make, man, and fly them, we realise something of the great advance which has been made and of the individual part which has been played by airmen in this war. The history of the aerial combats in these years of fighting has been a series of epics, each one of which might demand a Homer. An Iliad would be only too short to do justice to their principal features. But whether we think of the amazing development of the machines, the resourcefulness of the airmen, the incredible bravery and audacity of their flights in the skies, or the toll of human life exacted, I venture to say that there is not a more admirable page not merely in the history of the war but in the records of the British race.

There are other paragraphs of the Motion to which I can do no more than allude in passing. The services of the doctors and surgeons and female nurses are alluded to. Amid the horrors of war those persons of both sexes presented a picture of the highest ideals of peace. On the battlefield, behind the lines, at the clearing stations, in the hospitals, amid shot and shell, face to face with human agony in all its phases, living constantly in the ante-chambers of death, they pursued their merciful and blessed tasks. The procession which escorted a few weeks ago through the streets of London, to Westminster Abbey, the exhumed body of a single woman—a woman not differing from scores of others, a woman unknown to fame till in one single hour she attained immortality, was an epitome of the services which countless others of her sex have rendered, and which have placed a new crown on the brow of woman.

The concluding paragraph of this Motion asks the House to acknowledge with deep submission and reverence the heroism of those who have fallen in the service of the country and to tender its sympathy to their relatives in the hour of their sorrow and their pride. I have often in this House before spoken of these losses. They are very visible here. Fifteen members, I believe, of your Lordships' House went out never to return. There have died in the war 160 sons of Peers, in many cases the hopes and heirs of their line. These losses, my Lords, are typical of those endured by every class of the community. There is not one amongst us, in all probability, sitting here to-day who has not lost relatives of his own. Some families have been almost wiped out. We read of fathers and mothers giving two, three, and four sons to the war, and there is not a village, scarcely a hamlet, in this country which does not mourn those they have lost. The simple wooden crosses mark their graves in distant lands, and everywhere you see sculptured memorials and tablets being set up to keep their memory green at home.

We can offer here no consolation to the bereaved. The thanks of this House—of both Houses of Parliament—are not heard in the grave, and they can give but little comfort to the living. But, my Lords, in their hearts those who have lost must be conscious of a great exultation. Any one of us in whose family was one who died at Waterloo, and who sees in the church where he worships, either on the walls or on a tombstone in the churchyard, the record of that sacrifice, thrills even to this day with honourable pride at the recollection. It becomes a family treasure and an immortal possession. So will it be with those who have lost their dear ones in this struggle. The record of their sacrifices and the memory of their daring will gild the family annals for centuries to come, and later generations, as they see the memorial, will say of him who fell in this war, "He died on the field of honour; he lives for ever in the fields of fame."

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  1. TRIBUTE TO MARSHAL FOCH. 4,778 words