WAR MEMORIAL

Hokitika Guardian, 24 November 1932, Page 5

WAR MEMORIAL

AT PORT SAID

TRIBUTE PAID BY MR HUGHES

(United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright.)

PORT SAID, November 23

The Northampton Regiment, to which are allied the Forty-third arid Forty-eighth Australian Battalions and also the Fifteenth Battalion of the North Auckland Regiment provided the guard of honour" for Rt. Hon. W. M. Hughes at the unveiling at Port Said to-day of a memorial to the Light,Horse and other Sinai combatants. King Fuad of Egypt was represented by lii.s Grand Chamberlain. The principal officers of the • British Army an c ] Air Force, and of the Egvptain Prime Minister, Sitky Pasha, also other representatives of the Egyptian and Palestine Governments were present.

Mr Hughes, after reviewing the chequered history of the monument, neither of whose sculptors had lived to see it completed,. paid an eloquent tribute to those commemorated.

“To all who pass along the Suez Canal,” he said, “this monument must make nn irresistable appeal, for it tells a story not less enthralling, romantle and wonderful than the 'Odyssey’ itself. The most sluggish Image nation must be fired by a recital of the journeyings of young warriors from far off homes to this ancient land. Bred in remote countries, in an environment of perfect peace, those who never heard a shot fired in anger come to fight in the greatest war in history, and proved themselves born fighters, facing the rigours of a stern campaign in Palestine and Syria. The buoyancy of their spirits rose triumphant. Their belief in ultimate victory never weakened. Their’s in deed was a deathless story.”

Mr Hughes also paid a. tribute to the Australian Flying Corps, which the monument also commemorates, saying that Lord Allenby’s masterly strategy, culminating in Sunnes, a battle of Armaggeddon, owed much to the Australian airmen, destroying enemy machines and making reconnaissance impossible. “The men we commemorate to-day,” he said, “made and changed history. Though their bones'be bleached by desert suns and their bodies covered by foreign soil, their spirits live, and their memories will rqmain fragrant through the. ages.”

Major J. N. Stubbs (formerly of Auckland) and now Director of the Lands Department in Palestine, represented New Zealand at the ceremony and placed a wreath on the monument.