ROYAL VISIT TO OUR WAR GRAVES

TOUCHING CEREMONY.

It was a short, simple, but profoundly impressive ceremony in the Terlincthun British Military Cemetery to-day which ended the King’s pilgrimage to the British graveyards in Belgium and France. For two days his Majesty has visited the scenes of the epic struggles in which British soldiers had fallen, and then the cemeteries where they were laid to rest. These visits to the tombs of our valorous dead were private, and free from formal ceremonies, from spoken words which could only mar the impressions engendered by pilgrimage of such solemn import. Therefore, the impressions of how our heroes died and of the places where they sleep grew in silence – in that silence so eloquent of thought, in that atmosphere of peace where anything like display and activity would savour of something like profanity, of interference with the pious homage of which brave men who died in their country’s cause are worthy. So the King, in keeping with his wish, was left to his private meditations in walking through these fields of dead made bright with spring flowers, and over which the songs of birds are heard. Appropriate as was this decision for silence in visiting the graves of his fallen soldiers, equally fitting was it that at the close of a memorable week, the events of which have been so closely followed by his subjects in the Homeland and the Empire, and particularly by those to whom the war brought sorrow and sacrifice, his Majesty should give expression to the thoughts born of his sad pilgrimage.

The King’s speech in Terlincthun Cemetery to-day was short but eloquent in its phrasing, and pathetic in its form, while running through it was the note of the eternal gratitude of his Majesty and his Empire, of a firm wish to keep for ever green the memory of 700,000 men of British blood who made the supreme sacrifice in the Great War.