Page:Armistice Day.djvu/267

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THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
245

THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER HONORED BY ENGLAND

BY SIR PHILIP GIBBS

No Military Potentate of high rank or great achievement who died in the course of the war received such a funeral as fell to the lot of a nameless poilu who was buried under the Arc de Triomphe on Armistice Day, in token of the eternal gratitude of the whole nation to the common soldiers who sacrificed their lives for France. The unknown poilu's only rival in honor was a nameless British private who, on the same day, was borne through the streets of London, with King George of England as his chief mourner, to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Sir Philip Gibbs writes the obituary of this nameless British warrior of the ranks, in whom the Empire memorialized thousands of his comrades, known and unknown. The English correspondent, knighted for the services which his pen rendered to his country during the war, thus describes the funeral in a special dispatch to the New York Times:

It did not seem an unknown warrior whose body came on the gun-carriage down Whitehall