TWO GENERATIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 August 1940, Page 5

TWO GENERATIONS

DEDICATION OF BRITISH MANHOOD BROADCAST BY VISCOUNT GORT. INSPIRATION OF SACRIFICE. ( (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, August 4. Viscount Gort, broadcasting, said: “It has been my fortune to fight alongside two generations of soldiers, and from what I have seen during the past months I know khat the younger generation is brimful of courage and ready to sacrifice all for the great cause for which we are fighting. We older soldiers and veterans of the last war are < proud to be in the ranks with these 1 sons of Britain, and on this anniver- : sary our memories carry us back to : the last war. “Our thoughts turn to our brothers who lie buried but not forgotten in Flanders fields. With war once more in our midst, we not unnaturally ask ourselves whether those who died in those never-to-be-forgotten years, together with those who have fallen in the present war, have given their lives l in vain. I find comfort in the words of Abraham Lincoln: 'We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have dice! in vain, that this nation undei God shall have a new birth of freedom.’ “If the lamps of freedom have been extinguished by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it is by the inspiration of sacrifice of our old comrades that we shall relight them. And yet we may be thankful that they have been spared the sight of horrors far greater than those we witnessed in 1914. “Never shall I forget the savagery of total war which heralded the arrival in Western Europe of this new and revised version of the German doctrine that might is right—the pitiable terror o£ men and women in Belgium and northern France, the ruining of many of them for the second time in their lives, and the rendering of them homeless and penniless before the- invader. And what a cruel fate to see towns and villages which have been so laboriously rebuilt after the last war once again reduced to heaps of ruins, and to what purpose—to impose by force on free people a creed abhorrent to them and to satisfy the lust for domination of one man to whom the text ‘Love thy neighbours as thyself is meaningless. “Strong, therefore, in support of oui faith and of that armour of God of which St. Paul speaks, we dedicate ourselves anew’ to this crusade which shall rid the world of a scourge. In ' this spirit let us all go forward tol gether.” __