From the day of his accession King George has been confronted with trials and troubles enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and none of us can plumb the depth of anguish that must have been his through the awful years of the Great War. He has been tried and proved in the fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged ennobled by pain, and dowered by sorrow with a gift of expression that has placed him among the masters of the glory of English prose.
On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a tour of the cemeteries in France at Terlinchthun, where there stands on the cliffs over-looking the Channel a monument to Napoleon and his Grand Army, and around it now lie the innumerable English dead.
Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and Lord Haig had in his presence clasped hands, and the King with a fine gesture had placed his own right hand upon their clasped ones and said, "Amis toujours!" We are told that, "going up to the Cross of Sacrifice, the King looked out over the closely marshalled graves to the sea, and back towards the woods and fields of the Canche Valley where Montreuil stands, and seemed reluctant to leave."
At last he turned, and, standing before the great Cross of Sacrifice, he spoke from his heart words that those of us, Antony, who love our country and the glory of its language will cherish while we live:--
"For the past few days I have been on a solemn pilgrimage in honour of a people who died for all free men.
"At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I followed ways already marked by many footsteps of love and pride and grief, I should like to send a message to all who have lost those dear to them in the Great War, and in this the Queen joins me to-day, amidst these surroundings so wonderfully typical of that single-hearted assembly of nations and of races which form our Empire. For here, in their last quarters, lie sons of every portion of that Empire, across, as it were, the threshold of the Mother Island which they guarded, that Freedom might be saved in the uttermost ends of the earth.
"For this, a generation of our manhood offered itself without question, and almost without the need of a summons. Those proofs of virtue, which we honour here to-day, are to be found throughout the world and its waters--since we can truly say that the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. Beyond the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through Eastern Europe in well-nigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing over the holy Mount of Olives itself to the furthest shores of the Indian and Pacific Oceans--from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk to the hidden wildernesses of East Africa.