Marshal Foch ’s Last Tribute to Scottish Valour

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 632, 8 April 1929, Page 14

Marshal Foch ’s Last Tribute to Scottish Valour

'‘Memory of the Dead Will Live for Ever ” EARL HAIG’S COUNTRYMEN “My first and strongest in- I | junction to the people of Scotland. j ! assembled to do honour to the dead \ | of our common cause, is to make i sure that the memory of their dead lives for ever, and lives [ untarnished by ,the pettiness of the malicious, toho can always be 1 ! found to throw mud at the dead.” j 1 Thus began the Armistice Day message of the late Marshal Foch forwarded to Scotland on November 9 last year and published in the ’"Scotsman” on November 10. "In the memory of your dead,” ran the last tribute of the dead generalissimo, "you have a precious heritage. ! I know something of the qualities of I the men to whom you are doing honj our to-day, and I am proud to join I you in doing honour to them. 1 “I know that in the darkest days I of the W T orld War, when even the op- | timists among us began to doubt, it j was the sublime heroism of these great i souls that kept alive our faith and | laid the foundation of our ultimate j triumph. Our victory was built on | j the foundation of their altar on which ! these heroes sacrificed their lives, and j the nation that would forget them and j their story deserves to be forgotten for ever. “I can recall one visit I made to the headquarters of Earl Haig during the most anxious days. Everything depended on whether the British line would hold at a point that might be termed the hinge linking it to ours. I wanted to reassure myself on that point, and together with the British commander, I went to where the men of the immortal Fifty-first Division were barring with their bodies the tide of German invasion. There was pride in the eyes and the voice of Haig as he showed me something of the spirit in which the men of his race were meeting the onset, and I went away infected with his belief that where such men were, there could be no defeat for our common cause. DEBT TO THE DEAD "We must never forget the debt we owe to the dead, and I look to their comrades and mine in the Great War to pass on to the future generations their testimony to the sublime heroism of those who died that we might live free. “My heroic comrades from Scotland, whether they wer.e Highlanders or Lowlanders, live in my heart to-day, and in my moment of silence there will flash through my mind a picture of their heroism as I visualised it in the days when the men of your race were called on to give their lives without flinching, in order that victory might be made certain for those who came after them. “There are moments in w r ar when the highest call of duty is to lay down ones’ life voluntarily, and the highest form of heroism is to realise when that moment has come and be ready to make the sacrifice demanded. The Scots of the Fifty-first Division knew that this moment had come for them, and they get their faces to the foe with the determination to give their lives, but never to give ground. “Those of us who passed on the road to victory over the ground on which these men made their stand, were left in awe by the expression of triumph on the faces of the dead encumbering the ground. To us it was clear that these men died in the knowledge that they had laid the. foundations of a great victory and were content. to die with their work achieved. “There will be sad hearts before your shrines on Sunday. The widow and the orphan will be there to pay tribute to the husband and father. The maid will be there to honour the memory of the lover who never came back. To them would I say that even if their hearts are heavy with the loss of their loved ones, even if they are poorer to-day by that loss, they should realise that they are rich in the memories of the heroes who did not shrink from the great sacrifice when they knew it was necessary. "RACE GREATER THAN EVER” “The dead died happy in the knowledge that they had won the freedom of those they left behind, and, in dying, they were happier by far than they could ever have been had they lived to share with their loved ones the state of subjection to a despicable despotism that would have been their lot and the lot of those they loved had they shrank from the sacrifice and returned conquered. “That Is the thought that brings comfort to my heart to-day when I pass in review the comrades I have lost, and it is my prayer that the same thought will bring comfort to the thousands of bereaved, who will be doing honour to my heroic Scottish comrades before your shrines on Sunday. “In one of the last talks I had with your great countryman, Earl Haig, he said to me, ‘lt is when I think of the dead that I am proudest of my countrymen. I realise that the race is greater than ever it was. Great as were the heroes of the world, they never attained to such heights of greatness as the commonest soldier of our Armies who died amid the horrors of this inferno that we call the World War.’ “And I agree with Earl Haig.”