"
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.
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