We honor our heroic and patriotic dead by being true men, as true men by faithfully fighting the battles of our day as they fought the battles of their day.
We are still men, and worthy of our fathers.
That is what Memorial Day 1919 says to us.
Not in pride nor vain boasting but in fearful and solemn humility we speak, for it is our dead that prompt us. They, our kin and blood, were not afraid to die.
When the Destroyer came, the obscene Dragon, with breath of poison gas, eyes of hell fire, and teeth of steel, they did not shrink, our brothers, but played the man, and struck, and dying struck again, and flung their shredded bodies into the breach, and "filled the gap up with our English dead."
We put our arms around our dead, and hold them proudly up to God, and glory before all men that this is our breed.
The lies of the Accuser are disproved. His slanders fall from us. We are not slaves of greed, money grubbers, soft and lily-livered. We know how to suffer and to die. We, too, can follow the gleam.
O Greeks of Marathon, room for us! Through Chateau Thierry and the wood of Argonne we have come up to stand by your side, and dare to call you Brothers.
You Five Hundred of Balaklava, meet these boys from Kansas and New York, who also rode blithely into the valley of death. They are your kind.
You men of Bunker Hill, of Gettysburg and of San Juan, place! place for these, our neighbors' sons, our friends and playmates!
For them also the laurel, and the royal requiem! For them the Cross of Honor, and the Divine Halo!
They are ours! Ours! Dear God, we will be worthy of them. Thus cries the poet of America:
"Allons! After the great Companions, and to belong to them!
"What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature?
"Now understand me well--it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.
The service flag is not an official flag of the United States Government. The idea was, so far as we are advised, an entirely novel one, the credit for the conception of which appears to be due to R. L. Queisser, of Cleveland, Ohio, who designed and patented the present flag. It has, however, taken such firm root in popular sentiment and has been of such beneficial influence that it is officially recognized, and everyone who is entitled to fly it is encouraged and urged to do so.