FOR in him they will see the emblem of the mightiest tribute ever laid on the nation’s altar. In him we do reverence to that generation of Britain’s young menhood* that perished in the world’s madness and sleeps for ever in foreign lands.
None of us will look on that moving scene without emotion. But something more will be required of us than a spasm of easy, tearful emotion that exhausts itself in being felt. What have we, the living, to say to the dead who pass by in shadowy hosts? They died for no mean thing. They died that the world might be a better and a cleaner place for those who lived and for those who come after. As that unknown soldier is borne down Whitehall he will issue a silent challenge to the living world to say whether it was worthy of his sacrifice. And if we are honest with ourselves we shall not find the answer easy.
* A rare plural form of manhood. Gardiner does not see the tomb of the Unknown Warrior as a symbol of ‘manhood’ in the sense of courage and maturity; he sees it as a symbol of the men of the nation collectively sacrificed for the sake of their posterity, hence of the country’s ‘menhood.’