THE ENTENTE GLORIFIED

Hokitika Guardian, 31 January 1921, Page 4

THE ENTENTE GLORIFIED

(By Raymond Poincare, ex-President of the French Republic). A splendid symbol is expressed by the solemnities which are taking place on the same day, at the same hour, and with the same sentiment in London and in Paris. This moving .homage rendered by two peoples to Unknown Soldiers assumes in the history of Britain and of France a majectic meanin. Till to-day (Nov. 11) tlie usual formula of national gratitude always resembled more or less the inscription placed in 1830 on the facade of our Pantheon, “To our great men, a grateful nation.” And certainly neither the British Empire nor France will ever forget their illustrious servants, civil and military, who have contributed to the Victory of Right. With the surest of instincts both countries have understood that neither truth nor justice would be entirely satisfied if their voices and their admiration were reserved for those citizens whose gallant deeds it, was possible to recall or whose heroic deaths weie

known. When the Athenians built to the "Unknown God” the altar which St Paul saw when he presented himself before the Areopagus, they bail tlie vague feeling that the inhabitants of Olympus were no longer the sole rulers of the world, and they had had to give way to a now Deity. . And so to-day in honoring each their Unknown Hero the two nations wished to proclaim that from the fearful crisis from which they have emerged triumphant they needed to preserve a new and mysterious power, superior to the finest individual energy—that is the obscure, the anonymous self-saeri-fi<o of an infinite number of dnknown heroes, the universality of popular abnegation and unrecorded death, uncrowned by glory. I should have wished that both in London and in Paris the coffins of the British and the French soldiers could have been accompanied by the coffins of a comrade from each of the other Allied nations, just as last year in the Victory March, in Paris all the Armies which had fought side by side were represented. The bond which united us all so closely during the war would have been, as is were, consecrated by this magnificent funeral ceremony. Tlie significance of this would not have been bounded by our respect of frontiers. It would have shone forth in the glorious light of the services pointly rendered by our two peoples in the cause of the tutuie of humanity. In the absence of this common demonstration the identity of inspiration and the solemnity *ot the manifestations organised in our two capitals have at least brought together in one thought the souls of our respective nations. France, licsides, has had the pious satisfaction of saluting at Boulogne the mortal remains of the Warrior which were leaving for England and of rendering to this hero the same honour as it had rendered to a great King already before the war, who worked most usefully to link the two nations in friendly relations. Nobody dreams less than I. of diminishing the importance of the happy initiative taken in accord with his Ministers by King Edward VII, hut the first creator of the Entente Cordiale was, if I may say so, the “l liknown God,” that is to say, public opinion, the mail in the street-, the anonymous champion of this ideal. If British and ■french citizens as a whole had not. realised the necessity of intimate collaboration between the two countries, no sm h accord would have been possible. To appreciate the effect of this popular feeling I personally have to remember tlie hearty reception given in 1913 by the City of London to the President of the French Republic, and the enthusiastic greeting’which King George and Queen Alary received in Paris in the summer of 1914, oiily a few weeks before the day when the Central Empires let loose war on Europe and on the world. How could the mighty forces which had created this union between us before those terrible events which so well proved its necessity fail to work again with the same success to maintain and to fortify our Entente? If Britain and France are to-day celebrating the armistice, it is because they see in this victorious peace a guarantee for the future. They -should both of them therefore desire the maintenance of the conditions which Itave ensured victory. The first condition, the most imperative, the most essential, is Franco-Bri-tish friendship. The anniversary of the armistice would be nothing if it were not its glorification of this friendship.