DEAD HEROES OF THE EMPIRE’S NAVIES.

TO-DAY’S CEREMONY.

By ARCHIBALD HURD. An old peasant entered the Cathedral at Amiens the other day and stretched out his hand in a sub-conscious manner, as he had done many times before, that he might dip his fingers in the holy water. But the font had disappeared, and his eyes rested instead on a beautiful tablet, with a French translation of the English inscription. He stood and read of the way in which the men of the British Empire fought and died for the cause of civilisation in the tragic years which are fast receding into the historic past. Another tablet is almost finished in Notre Dame, in the heart of Paris, and it is proposed to erect similar aidesmémoire in all the cathedrals along the French and Belgian front. Under the mingled arms of the British nations, emblazoned in appropriate colours, is inscribed in English, as well as French, an undying legend: “To the glory of God and to the memory of one million dead of the British Empire who fought in the Great War, 1914-1918, and of whom the greater part rest in France.” Men and women, who may forget the Stone of Remembrance and the Cross of Sacrifice set up in the cemeteries which stretch from the English Channel to the Vosges, with their pathetic gravestones, surrounded by trees and flowers and grass, and tended by British gardeners – all ex-service men – will thus be reminded whenever they go to their devotions of the common cause which drew together Britain and France in a supremo effort by sea, by land, and in the air.

Under the inspiration of the War Graves Commission, the one really Imperial body which remains – financed by the whole Empire and responsible to the whole Empire – “a girdle of honour” has been placed round the globe, stretching through Belgium and France to Switzerland and Italy, then passing across Macedonia, down the Gallipoli Peninsula to Smyrna, and thus by way of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, East Africa, and China, to Australia and New Zealand, and so across Canada to the British Isles. Though tens of thousands of the graves of our dead who rest in these far countries have already their memorial stones above them, suitably inscribed with the last messages of mothers or fathers, widows or children, headstones are still being erected at the rate of 2,000 a week. It is a task of years. These hundreds of cemeteries are permanent tokens of a debt which can never be paid. They will serve as a memorial to our heroes as well as to the cause for which they gave their all when the present generation and its immediate successors have gone their way in the unresting progress of the years.

“THE SILENT NAVY.”

But the ancient Royal Navy of Henry VIII.’S foundation and the younger navies of the great Dominions, as well as the merchant fleet of this country, helped in the winning of victory. The merchant seamen are commemorated on the cliffs at St. Margaret’s Bay as well as on the other side of the English Channel, and memorials have been raised to the unconquerable Dover Patrol. So far the dead of “The Silent Navy” have gone not unhonoured, but without visible memorial to recall to those who come after us how “the bridge was kept” across which the troops and all that they required of food, guns, ammunition, medical and other stores, and a hundred and one other things, passed in an unceasing stream to the oversea theatres of war. The Fleet also, of course, stood between this country, with its 40,000,000 mouths, and the menace of starvation, and the nation’s sense of gratitude on that account is not dead.

The men who performed such miracles of seamanship and maintained so lofty a standard of patriotic duty, at last surrendering their lives, have not been forgotten, as to-day’s ceremony at Chatham will attest. The Prince of Wales, in the presence of the First Lord of the Admiralty and a number of senior officers of the Navy, will unveil a memorial to the men of that mobilising port who never returned home. Officers and men of the Fleet will gather to do honour to their dead comrades with a ceremonial befitting the occasion.