"Duty," "Honor,"
"Country" - those three hallowed words
reverently dictate what you want to be, what you
can be, what you will be. They are your rallying
point to build courage when courage seems to
fail, to regain faith when there seems to be
little cause for faith, to create hope when hope
becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither
that eloquence of diction, that poetry of
imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to
tell you all that they mean.
The unbelievers will say
they are but words, but a slogan, but a
flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every
demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every
troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some
others of an entirely different character, will
try to downgrade them even to the extent of
mockery and ridicule.
They teach you to be
proud and unbending in honest failure, but
humble and gentle in success; not to substitute
words for action; not to seek the path of
comfort, but to face the stress and spur of
difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up
in the storm, but to have compassion on those
who fall; to master yourself before you seek to
master others; to have a heart that is clean, a
goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never
forget how to weep; to reach into the future,
yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet
never take yourself too seriously; to be modest
so that you will remember the simplicity of true
greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the
meekness of true strength.
What sort of soldiers
are these we speak of?
Their story is known to
all of you. It is the story of the American man
at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the
battlefields many, many years ago, and has never
changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him
now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not
only as one of the finest military characters,
but also as one of the most stainless.
His name and fame are
the birthright of every American citizen. In his
youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he
gave all that mortality can give. He needs no
eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has
written his own history and written it in red on
his enemy's breast.
But when I think of his
patience under adversity, of his courage under
fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled
with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into
words. He belongs to history as furnishing one
of the greatest examples of successful
patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the
instructor of future generations in the
principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to
the present, to us, by his virtues and by his
achievements.
In twenty campaigns, on
a hundred battlefields, around a thousand
campfires, I have witnessed that enduring
fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and
that invincible determination which have carved
his statue in the hearts of his people.
From one end of the
world to the other, he has drained deep the
chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs
of the glee club, in memory's eye I could see
those staggering columns of the First World War,
bending under soggy packs on many a weary march,
from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging
ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads;
to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped,
covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind
and rain, driving home to their objective, and
for many, to the judgment seat of God.
I do not know the
dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory
of their death. They died unquestioning,
uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and
on their lips the hope that we would go on to
victory. Always for them: Duty, Honor, Country.
Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as
they saw the way and the light.
And twenty years after,
on the other side of the globe, against the
filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly
trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those
boiling suns of the relentless heat, those
torrential rains of devastating storms, the
loneliness and utter desolation of jungle
trails, the bitterness of long separation of
those they loved and cherished, the deadly
pestilence of tropic disease, the horror of
stricken areas of war.
Their resolute and
determined defense, their swift and sure attack,
their indomitable purpose, their complete and
decisive victory - always victory, always
through the bloody haze of their last
reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly
men, reverently following your password of Duty,
Honor, Country.
The soldier, above all
other men, is required to practice the greatest
act of religious training - sacrifice. In battle
and in the face of danger and death, he
discloses those divine attributes which his
Maker gave when he created man in his own image.
No physical courage and no brute instinct can
take the place of the Divine help which alone
can sustain him. However horrible the incidents
of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to
offer and to give his life for his country, is
the noblest development of mankind.
Yours is the profession
of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge
that in war there is no substitute for victory,
that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed,
that the very obsession of your public service
must be Duty, Honor, Country.
The long gray line has
never failed us. Were you to do so, a million
ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue
and gray, would rise from their white crosses,
thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor,
Country.
This does not mean that
you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier
above all other people prays for peace, for he
must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and
scars of war. But always in our ears ring the
ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all
philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end
of war."
Thank you for your
unfathomable love and sacrifice, rest in peace,
the war is over for you now.
