Illinois State Normal University - Index Yearbook (Normal, IL)

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I 3 3 THE INDEX va fa 1919 A Y., ADDRESS OF WELCOME TO OUR RETURNED SOLDIERS AND SAILORS No words of greeting' are needed at this hour to show you we are happy. We show it in every hand clasp, in every act, in every look. Vile are proud of you, proud of your upstanding figures, of the glow of health that mantles your cheek and lights your eye, prouder still of what you undertook and of what you have accomplished. You have not been privileged to bear an equal part in the great struggle. Some got no further than the S. A. T. O. units hastily assembled last October, half army and half school, hardly organized until the armistice was signed. Others reached our great military and naval camps, to be instructed, drilled, hardened for the field. Here some of you were racked with fever, others enlisting in a new, untried and dangerous arm of the service, risked even unto death to gain the skill that promised so nruch in modern war. Some of you crossed the Atlantic to serve as engineers, and quartermasters and clerks, in building docks and railroads and in the hundred auxiliary occupations that support and sustain a modern army. Only a. few were privileged to enter the thick of the fight, to give blow for blow, to suffer from wounds, gas, and shell-shock, to sec your comrades fall all about you, to feel the mighty exaltation of the thought that the supreme hour has come when upon your fidelity, your devotion, your personal heroism and skill in the fight, hangs in no small measure the destiny of the nations. I Yet you all helped to win the war. The German collapse was due not only to the dash and intrepidity of the few hundred thousand who fought at Belleau Wood and Olrateau Thierry, at St. Mihiel and in the Argonne forest. lt was the knowledge that there were two million such Americans in France, and two million more in arduous training on this side, it was the knowledge that the great resources of your country, both in men and money, were all pledged to this great undertaking that convinced the enemy of the hopelessness of further struggle. The men in front win battles, but the reserves win the war. And while to you belongs the greater honor, for you were in the fight or were on the way to it, you had bid the last good-bye and had steeled your soul for the supreme sacrifice if your country needed it, do not forget the part that the home folks played in this mighty drama. Never before had our people worked and prayed and sacrificed as in these anxious months. Never before had our mines and forests, our farms and factories poured forth such a flood of products to maintain our armies in the field and to support our allies. The Red Cross and other organizations enlisted almost every man, woman, and child in the land to minister to your physical needs in camp, and field, and trench, and hospital, to brighten your lives, to sustain your spirits, to conserve your rnorale-, to promote your moral and spiritual welfare. And now that you are returned, do not think your work is done. You have won the great fight against militarism, and autocracy,-against the doctrine that might makes right. Do not think that because you have cut the weeds in your neig'hbor's field that none will ever grow in yours. Peace and justice-peace abroad, justice at home. You have, we believe, secured the first, it is no less your privilege and your duty to secure and maintain the second. But the seeds of autocracy, of militarism, of oppression, of social wrong are among' us. In ten, twenty, thirty years, the soldiers of this war will be at the head of affairs carrying the load of our national destiny. You will fill our legislative halls, you will sit on the judges' bench, you will furnish our mayors, our governors, our presidents. You have formed a new conception of human brotherhood, a conception that will triumph over prejudices of creed and race and nationality. You have, we trust, caught a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. May this vision grow clearer, may it cheer and sustain you, and may you also have the intelligence, the wisdom, the courage and the self-control to build it into the everlasting structure of our national life. - 19