HEROISM UNDIMMED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 January 1943, Page 4

HEROISM UNDIMMED

WHEN THE BELLS OF BRITAIN RANG AGAIN. There was drama in the simple announcement that the bells of Britain would ring again, after their long and meaningful silence, to call to prayer and thanksgiving for the victory m Africa. But Americans who heard the bells, ringing across the air waves, on Sunday had an even more moving experience. From London, from Scotland, from Northern Ireland, from Wales, from a little Lancashire town, came the joyous peals ,each with its individual accent to tell of some facet of British life, each with historic associations grown richer and more majestic through the tragedy and courage of the last few years. And at the end, fittingly, the deep voice:of Coventry’s surviving tower chanted “O God, our help in ages past” .... It was just two years since the barbarians first visited Coventry in brutal force. They came again, and Coventry became a symbol of Nazi wrath, while Goebbels gloated. But Coventry was more. On Good Friday, in 1941, while the city’s ruins still smouldered, a little group gathered in the roofless cathedral, under a drizzling rain, “some weeping, some grimy, some without sleep for three days.” From blackened timbers, a rude cross had been fashioned; a block of masonry formed the pulpit. That was a dark hour; the Nazi tide of victory was at flood, and it almost seemed that the shadowed scene in Coventry was an all too faithful representation of the hopes of men of good will—shattered by evil, as the outward signs of their faith had been shattered. But from Coventry’s improvised pulpit came words' of courage: “There is a strange power in these ruins.” One could hear those words again in the bells of Coventry and feel that power as they rang .... “Our hope for years to come.” There is a new world to build, and from the wreckage that evil has wrought springs the power to build finer, cleaner and stronger.—New York “Herald-Tribune.”