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SUNDAY THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER 337
" Yet another cry I seem to hear from those trench graves :
’
Do not forget our sufferings and our wounds
!
’ My dear
comrades ! Those among our people who still retain their
moral earnestness will never forget the wounds and the suffer-
ings which this war has brought with it. The price of our
liberation and of our victories is the most precious and most
noble that a people can pay—the blood of our young man-
hood ! Come and see how we are burying the young ! We
cannot even give them a plain coffin ! We cannot, as the
ancient Teutons did, raise them on our shields and carry them
over hill and dale to their German home. But, dear brethren,
I know of a sarcophagus which is more precious than a coffin
—
fashioned by the hand of a greater Master—I mean the sarco-
phagus of the German heart. Deeply enshrined there, let us
lay our dear dead to rest and carry them home with us, some
day, to the Gennan native land. And if, some day—which
God our Protector in our German fight forbid—a time should
come when a generation of young men and young women does
not know what the peace and the new prosperity of the empire
has cost us, when people in laxity and luxury only live to
enjoy the fruits, when people abandon themselves to the strange
gods of demoralising and pernicious habits—then, my dear
brethren, the time will have come for us, who have been stand-
ing to-day in sorrow around these tombs, to open the sarco-
phagus of our hearts and exhibit to a slothful generation our
dead, their wounds and their dying moments ! Then the
spirits of the fallen shall fight another and a harder fight
against those of our own people who no longer preserve the
memory of the gaping wounds of war in the innermost recesses
of their soul !
" Thus this day on which we commemorate our dead is in
reality a day of surging life, of new hopes and of urgent tasks.
These graves are a gigantic reproach to our enemies, but to
us they will be a sacred memorial in the time to come. Those
who have sown the storms shall reap the whirlwind ! And
this whirlwind is now raging over their land ! Led astray by
petty motives and by small groups of selfish partisans, ’
they
have sown in the flesh and they shall reap destruction.’ We
venture to swear before God that we have sown in the spirit
of righteousness and peace. To us the war is a momentously
spiritual matter, which touches the innermost heart of a
nation which has risen in unity, which has been hurt in its
z
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