Excerpt from The Lesson of Our Dead: An Address in Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, on Memorial Day, May 30, 1918

For many years this day was the. Celebration of a tradition. A pious and loyal thought united your hearts in the commemoration of those who had given their lives to the great causes for which your country had fought. It was the festival of the dead. It was a pre cious opportunity to seek, in the contemplation of great examples, useful lessons in valor and self-denial. On each occasion you went away feeling stronger and better; you realized that the young sons of your nation had a heritage of glory to preserve intact, and the minds of the living found in this association with the spirit of the dead new reasons for pressing forward in the way which they had opened before you.

Last year the day had already taken on a new mean ing. This country, after two years of qualms and searchings, was at last living the exalted hours of a decision finally made. You had just declared war; your President had just announced momentous words, promise and assurance of victory that all the resources of your country, money, material, and men, should be pledged to the service of liberty; the judge had come upon the scene of the great drama and had thrown his sword into the balance. I remember my own emotion, in this same place, just a year ago. It was an hour of hope and of anxiety. We all thought of what the intervention of your country would mean; but another thought, at the same time, gripped our hearts. We thought of the price that must be paid, and one of those who spoke on that day, looking down on the young men grouped beneath his eyes, measured the pain of the sacrifice that must be borne.

This year we are again, and more than ever before, at the hour of hope but we are also at the hour of sacrifice, not expected, but accepted.

The hour of hope! Indeed we have had cruel experiences in these last twelve months, and bitter disillusionment. The Russian tragedy has come to a disappointing conclusion. In these last two months the enemy, massing his strength, recklessly hurling men and shells into the vast furnace, has succeeded in overflowing and sweeping back our lines at certain places. He has managed to recover, for the time, a few square miles of our unfortunate French soil, martyred and bleeding, and has added to the crime of Reims the crime of Amiens; he has achieved the magnificent success of killing in Paris, with his giant cannon a proper wmbol of Germany at war a few hundred women and old men and children; but he has found, too, before him, after a few weeks of mortal anxiety for our hearts, an unbreached and unbreachable wall of British, French, and American breasts. He has found a man, splendid and modest, on whose shoulders rests now the heavy burden of command over all the Allied forces, a man whom all the soldiers of the Army of Liberty hail as the beloved chief whose very name spells courage and success. And just as a hundred and forty years ago Lafayette placed his own life and the lives of his whole army in the hands of Washington, General Pershing gave the American Army to General Foch.

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