DP 65 .R5 Copy 1 Remarks of Brigadier-General George Ricliards U. S. M. C. AT THE MEETING OF The Sons of the Revolution IN THE STATE OF MARYLAND MARCH 15, 1918 "The Royal Welsh Fusiliers" Remarks of Brigadier-General George Richards U. S. M. C. AT THE MEETING OF Tlie Sons of the Revolution IN THE STATE OF MARYLAND MARCH 15, 1918 "The Royal Welsh Fusiliers" .'V^: 6 Mr. President and Members oe the Sons oe the Revolution in the State oe Maryland: I wish to thank you one and all for the honor you bestow on the Sons of the Revolution in the District of Columbia, in whose behalf I am asked to say a word. Our Society is bound to yours by a tender tie. Our first President and founder was likewise your first President. I refer to John Lee Carroll, of Maryland, the great-grandson of the immortal Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Signer of the Dec- laration of Independence. Also, let me say, when the General Society, Sons of the Revolution, was brought forth, John Lee Carroll became the first General President of our national organization. Governor Carroll's attachment to our Society arose from the fact that our birth preceded your own and from the circumstance that his winter residence at the time was in the city of Washington. But when the Society of the Sons of the Revolution in the State of Maryland came into existence we promptly recognized his feelings, for we appreciated that he, as a native son of Maryland, belonged more prop- erly to your organization. We regretfully accepted his resignation that he might answer your unani- mous choice and serve you as President of the Society in Maryland, the State of which he was a native and a citizen. In his attachment to you, to us, and to the General Society as well, John Lee Carroll will be remembered always as a patriotic gentleman of high and lofty ideals to whom we shall forever pay a tribute of respect and affection. He was of ancient lineage, heroic name, assured station ; he truly exemplified the purpose for which our So- cieties were founded. He knew that we were not brought forth to dream of an heroic past, but to act in a crying present. The Sons of the Revolution is not a family living alone on the former greatness of its ancestors, without plan or strength for the future. We wear a button or badge that tells the world what manner of men we sprang from, but it should not be forgotten that we stand today for what they stood, for freedom, for love of country and of law, and for equal opportunity to all. Ours is the most fortunate of all generations of Americans; a most priceless privilege has been afforded us in these times. In this great cataclysm that convulses the world, men are groping for some immutable rock of refuge, for some rule of life that will save them and all that has been accumulated by their sweat since the Dark Ages. Where is that rock to be found? What is that immutable rule? Americans know in their hearts that the rock of refuge and that rule of salvation is Liberty. It is the one sure reliance, the one guide to life, safety and happiness. And when you ask Americans where the founda- tions of the Liberty we enjoy are to be found, a great majority will name the American Revolution, where our ancestors suffered, for we have been so taught in our youth that Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill were its beginnings. While such may be true in one sense, let us not be led into false con- ceptions in this respect. Far be it from me to inti- mate that that Revolution was not of priceless im- portance to us and to mankind. But what our fathers fought there for were not so much the rights of themselves and their posterity. More par- ticularly they struggled for the rights of other Eng- lishmen, and what inspired them and made them master builders were those ancient Anglo-Saxon rights that had been won for them on English soil by their own forefathers. In our Capital, the city of Washington, there rises a lofty, splendid and stately spire, erected to the memory of that pivotal figure of our Revolution, George Washington. It rests upon a tremendous and solid base, necessary to its stability. Deep down in the ground that base is founded. How deep, how solid, no one knows but its builders, for its massive foundations are never now seen by us. If we go down into the cellar of our political history and study there the sills and sleepers of freedom, the foundations of the well- rounded dwelling wherein is found the liberty we all enjoy today, there is much that we shall see. That liberty, that freedom, owes its origin to begin- nings of fifteen hundred years ago. All through the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages and in modern times down to the Abolition of Slavery, those rights have been held and added to by the English-speaking peoples. They came not as summer breezes; most of them came in storm and stress; for centuries Anglo-Saxon skies have resounded with combats for liberties. What our fathers of the Revolution did in this relation presents a new view, for they not only secured to us, their posterity, the imperishable blessings we enjoy today, but also they freed every English colony from the selfish colonial policy of the times of George, the Third. And their action inspired all other peoples of the civilized world to examine carefully into their own rights, and this examination caused a realization of wrongs that set the world ablaze, first in England itself, then in the French Revolution, and later in the European Con- tinental uprisings in 1848. Our American Revolu- tion in this respect became one of the major founda- tions of Liberty — America's noble contribution to the list. It brought forth first the Declaration of Independence, an immortal document which from its inception has been in essence a declaration of war on all kings, princes and potentates the world over. And out of that struggle there was further brought forth the best system of free representative govern- ment thus far the world has ever seen — a system that secures justice to all and protects all, high and low alike, from the encroachment of unlicensed power. But none the less, that Revolution was but a step, one phase of a great movement involving the destiny of the human race that had preceded it for centuries and continues to this very day. Along that great highway over which humanity has pro- gressed in this movement, there are many milestones^ that mark its progress. The signing of the Magna Charta at Runnymede iii 1215 was one; the Refor- mation in Europe in the sixteenth century was an- other; the coming here of the Pilgrim Fathers yet another. So was the French Revolution that fol- lowed our own Revolution; so, in the thought of many, was our own Civil War. And, as we look back at our development as Americans and at the same time glance at the paths over which other na- tions now our allies, have trod, there we see diverg- ing or intersecting roads with the obstacles created by one nation against the other, when our interests and our aims did not seem identical. Now all those paths have centered into one main highway. There we, the free peoples of the world, are standing to- gether, bound in the one great cause of today. That cause concerns not the destiny of ourselves as indi- viduals, nor of ourselves as nations or peoples; it is a cause that concerns the fate of humanity itself. For, as we have grown in strength and in might, as liberalism has spread to other peoples, so has the rule of despots, of emperors and kings grown weaker. Today government by inheritance and ab- solutism have centered in a few, in one, we might say, in the hands of the German Kaiser himself. Under his guidance it is engaged in its death strug- gle. This war is to determine whether that form of government conceived by our fathers and dedi- cated to personal liberty is inherently and funda- mentally strong enough to survive against its oppo- site form where the power rests not with the people but with their privileged few. So it is, that inci- dentally, and accidentally, we are now fighting for England, just as England is now fighting for us; but essentially and fundamentally, we, all of us, the English, French, Belgian, Italian, Japanese and American people, are fighting for ourselves and for civilization. The call of today is for men to conse- crate their talents, their energy, their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in the cause of hu- manity. We, the Sons of the Revolution, clearly see that that struggle of our fathers was essentially a part of the struggle of today. One of our fore- most public men, in reminding us that George, the Third, with his packed and corrupt Parliament and his equally corrupt Cabinet, headed by Lord North, did not represent the true spirit of the English peo- ple, either in those times or since, put the case thus : The American Revolution was but a revolt against a Teutonic King of England, led by an English gen- tleman, by name George Washington. Now, in the English Army there is a hallowed custom which gives to every regiment the right to inscribe on their colors the name of every battle in which they participate. Do you know that there is one regiment of British troops that fought against us from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, who refused to inscribe their American battles on their colors? They said, when that, as a battle honor, was offered them, that they did not wish to commemorate battles where they had fought Englishmen. And this regi- ment fought in the Irish Wars, and there is no rec- ord of such battles on their regimental banners. We of the Marine Corps know that regiment well. Dur- ing the Boxer uprising in China, in the summer of 1900, we formed its acquaintance. It is known as the Twenty-third Foot, or the Royal Welsh Fusil- iers, and it was on an historic spot cherished by English-speaking peoples that our acquaintance was formed. At Taku, China, at the mouth of the Pei- ho River, more than fifty years before, Capt. Josiah Tattnall, of the American man-of-war Toeywan, came to the assistance of an English frigate, en- gaged with Chinese pirates, and uttered his mem- orable words, "Blood is thicker than water." There, on that very spot, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and the American Marines, early in that summer of 1900, wrote these words into actual deeds. We en- gaged there in battle against one enemy, and for the first time in the history of the two nations Eng- lish blood and American blood was shed together. I was not with those forces at that time. But a few weeks later I arrived, and on the night of July 12, at Tientsin, I saw the Twenty-third Foot for the first time. In the darkness of that night we allies were assembled on Victoria Road in the British concession of Tientsin. We were to endeavor to take the Chinese City of Tientsin some 3 miles away, held by a formidable force of Chinese troops and Boxers. The Twenty-third Foot came up and were halted in our immediate presence. By and by, the word was given to advance. *'Royal — Welsh !" was their command, instead of "Forward — March!" Away went those khaki-clad British sol- diers into the darkness. When dawn came, there on the open plain to our left was revealed the deployed skirmish line of the Welsh with their khaki-covered helmets standing clear on the sky-line. But on the backs of the British officers we noted something black in the shape of a triangle. "A good idea," we thought, "the men will know their officers, but the enemy in front will see no difference." Later in the day, after we had advanced under fire with heavy losses and had reached a position under the Walled Forts of Tientsin, whence we could proceed no further, we were again joined by. the Twenty- third Foot. We had settled there more or less ex- hausted, but had "dug in" to stick. Some of us turned to Capt. Gwynne, who commanded the Brit- ish forces, and, noting then that that black triangle was of ribbons, we said we thought it a clever idea so to distinguish their officers to their men and not to the enemy's snipers. "Not so," said Gwynne. "It serves that purpose here, but such is not the 8 object. These ribbons are the *flash' preserved by us in memory of our service in America in your Revolutionary War." And then he told us the story of the flash. In those times they wore the periwig, with its pigtails or queue. After the surrender of Yorktown they were sent to Nova Scotia, where they learned, a year or more after its discontinuance, that the pigtail was no longer in fashion. As the last regiment to wear the queue, they took the rib- bons with which the periwig was tied and sewed them to the backs of the collars of their tunics, and wore them thereafter as part of their uniform. In 1823, when some question arose as to their right to wear this as a distinctive feature of their uni- form, the circumstances became officially known, and an order came from the Crown, reading : "The King has been graciously pleased to approve the 'flashes,' now worn by the officers of the Twenty- third Foot, or Royal Welsh Fusiliers, being hence- forth worn and established as a peculiarity whereby to mark the dress of that distinguished regiment." And we learned some further interesting informa- tion as to the Twenty-third, which served to endear us, as Marines, to them. The Hon. Sir William Howe, commander-in-chief of His Majesty's armies in America, after Gen. Gage, was designated to that high command from service as colonel of the Royal Welsh. He, as you know, made a failure of his mission. When relieved by Sir Henry Clinton, the famous Admiral Howe, his brother, came to American shores in command of the British fleet. Then the French had openly come to our help with a squadron stronger than that of Admiral Howe. The British ships were insufficiently manned. Howe had no marines, and he made his wants known. Out of compliment to their former colonel's brother, the Royal Welsh volunteered for this duty. In iso- lated fights, the most notable of which was that with the French Caesar, a seventy-two, by the British I sis, of fifty guns, the spirited and gallant behavior of the Royal Welsh as marines was noted in the official reports. And let me tell you here something of more recent history. When our Gen. Pershing first set foot on British soil on June 10, 1917, from the gangplank of the steamer Baltic, the military bands greeted him as our most distinguished soldier with but one air, that to which the national hymns "America" and *'God Save the King" are set. And there was a guard of honor of British soldiers, who presented arms to him at this instant. It was com- posed of a detachment from the Royal Welsh, the Twenty-third Foot, the comrades of the United States Marine Corps of 1900. During its two hun- dred years of existence the Royal Welsh have been the recipient of many honors. The Prince of Wales' Feathers, the Red Dragon, and the Rising Sun are the badges of the Prince of Wales. They were given the Twenty-third for its services in the Marl- borough campaigns, when George, the First, in 1714, conferred on them the title "The Prince of Wales' Own Regiment of Welsh Fusiliers." To commem- orate this distinction, it advances to the command of "Royal — Welsh!" instead of to our "Forward — March!" And the White Horse of Hanover, the badge of George, the Second, was granted to the Royal Welsh after the battle of Dettingen (1743), where the King personally witnessed the regiment's gallantry. The Sphinx was awarded them after the Egyptian campaign in 1801, where the regiment car- ried a high, disputed sand hill at the landing. Its battle honors begin with Namur (1695), on what is now Belgian soil, and include such names as Blen- heim, Oudenarde, Egypt, Martinique, Corunna, Sal- amanca, Peninsula, Waterloo, Inkerman, Sebastopol, Lucknow, Burma, Peking, and Ladysmith. No regiment which, during by far the larger part of its history, has consisted of a single battalion, has a list of "battle honors" as long as that of the Twenty- 10 third Foot. When Gwynne told us that they had fought at Bunker Hill, we, asked him what hap- pened to them. ''Well, you jolly well shot us up 'there," he said. "Some sort of an order was given to your people to wait until we got to the top of the hill." "Yes,'' we said, "every American schoolboy knows that order, 'Wait until you see the whites of their eyes.' " "Well," said Gwynne, "it cost us eight hundred men out of twelve hundred, that day, so our regimental history says. But that, as history, is over. It is worth noting that these days are proud days for us; for the first time in the history of the two nations we, the regular forces of each, are acting together against a common enemy." So, there with the American dead and British dead about us, we became real friends, to remain so for- ever, each thereafter praising the other in official reports to their respective governments. Now the Twenty-third Foot is an old organization; with twenty-five other foot regiments, they were called into being in 1689, created by William of Orange, one of the most liberal of monarchs on the English throne, to take part in a struggle against the well- organized attempts of a mighty Bourbon military autocrat to force his will upon other freer but less disciplined nations of Europe. And history is now repeating itself; the Royal Welsh is again engaged in a like struggle with the greatest military autocrat of all times, in the cause to which we Americans are also consecrated, where they are once again shoul- der to shoulder with the United States Marines. At the beginning of the great war of today the home battalions of the Royal Welsh were assembled at Wrexham Depot for service in France. On French soil they fought and bled in the stress of those times. When the German advance was hurled back from the Marne, and modern trench warfare was initiated on the Aisne, after months of the fiercest fighting, there occurred an incident — a mo- 11 ment of relaxation, if it may be so called — that many of us read of at the time. On Christmas Eve of 1914, on a sector manned respectively on oppo- site sides by the Saxons and the British, the firing suddenly ceased, but not by orders. The Saxons shouted out first, "Don't shoot." The British lads held up their hands in assent. A barrel of beer came over the trenches from the Saxon side, and the British in turn gave over their surplus rations. These British troops who responded to this invita- tion were none other than the famous Twenty- third, the old associates in China of the United States Marines. Let us remember that Christmas Eve of 1914 and those Saxons, our enemies now. The carol chorus that arose from the German trenches that night came from hearts that for the time being expressed peace on earth and good will to mankind. Their ways are not our ways now, though their strain is in the Anglo-Saxon stock, but their song silenced for the time the crack of the sniper's rifle leveled across no man's land. *'You English there, why won't you come out," the Saxons called, and then the candles burned along parapets that were before guarded with ceaseless vigilance. A British chaplain gave to a Saxon colonel a copy of the English soldier's prayer, and in return received a cigar with a message for the bereaved family of a certain wounded British officer who had recently died a prisoner of war in German hands. And on the following Christmas Day the Saxons and the Welsh buried their dead and even played to- gether a game of football, where the Saxons won. That such things could have occurred in the midst of war seems unbelievable to us, but that they did occur there can be no mistake. It brings us back our faith in the virtues of men. That truce was not an official truce, for no Kaiser willed or authorized it. It came from the hearts of those who were bearing the brunt of war; it expressed that senti- 12 ment upon which in the end the world will once again be united. And, as we remember what came from the hearts of Saxons, chained unknowingly to them to the wheels of the Prussian military desp>ot- ism it is our duty to destroy, let us also hearken back to what it was my endeavor to make clear in the beginning. Let us again go down and examine the cellar of our political history and study there anew the sills and sleepers upon which our insti- tuted form of government, dedicated to personal liberty, rests. There we find certain fundamental rights inherent with that system, such as the right of public assembly, the right of petition, the right of protest and the right of free speech. But first of all we find there the right of public assembly. We, the English-speaking peoples, had a word "moot," a noun, meaning ordinarily a dispute, a debate, a discussion, but its original preferred definition was "a meeting,'* a formal assembly. It is a word of Anglo-Saxon origin. Those ancient Saxons, the forebears of the very men who declared that un- official truce that Christmas night, carried what we may now call the beginnings of representative gov- ernment out of the forests of Germany into Eng- land. They had what was known as the folkmoot, the hundredmoot, the villagemoot, and the shire- moot, assemblies of the people for the discussion of matters that concerned them — the people. Puny and imperfect but well defined, these moots — the seed of representative government — found lodg- ment on English soil. There it was nourished and has grown into the institutions we cherish and fight for today. For from these moots of the ancient Saxons there have grown, under our guidance, parliaments, congresses, legislatures and constitu- tions, and governments expressive of the public will, while in the Germany from whence the seed came, liberty is dumb. 13 Why did such corne to pass? To understand, let us read these words of the German Emperor, ut- tered very early in his reign : "It is the soldier and the army, not parliamentary majorities and votes, that have welded the German Empire together. My confidence rests upon the army." And again, in 1898, he said : "The most important heritage which my noble grandfather and father left me is the army, and I received it with pride and joy. To it I addressed the first decree when I mounted the throne. * * * And leaning upon it, trusting our old guard, I took up my heavy charge, knowing well that the army was the main support of my country, the main sup- port of the Prussian throne, to which the decision of God has called me." Von Bernhardi, in his book, "Germany and the Next War," thus expressed the German aims : "Our next war will be fought for the highest in- terests of our country and of mankind. This will invest it with importance in the world's history. 'World power or downfall!' will be our rallying cry." We are in this war to give expression by our deeds to the purpose of Almighty God. He has said: "He who would live by the sword shall die by the sword.'' So it is that every American who now crosses the Atlantic goes on a holy errand, and every gun, every shell, every bullet aimed at the heart of the enemy is engaged on a sacred work for the relief of humanity. America's cause is as just as Truth, as holy as a Benediction from the Al- mighty. In this ordeal, the cause of human liberty must either be advanced, or crushed. The w^orld is to become either all the one thing, or all the other — all slave or all free. 14 The New World is to carry forward this war for humanity from now on, and hereafter, so long as brute force attempts to control mankind. The clouds across the Atlantic are dark, indeed, in these times. But what of the radiance which shines from Heaven upon the free New World! Here is the hope of humanity. The Old World is inextricably engulfed in misery. It cannot do more than stagger along in bloody trenches, unable to make that suc- cessful war essential for an enduring peace. So, far aw^ay across the Atlantic, civilization stands stretching out its arms to us for help against the common enemy. So in answer to that call, in the name of Jesus Christ, we are going forward to victor}^ God, give us loyalty, God, give us forti- tude, God, give us unflinching and unfaihng cour- age to fight our country's cause and to fight glo- riously alike for Him. 15 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 020 384 724 4 ^