○  thayer award acceptance address  ○

birthright of every american citizen. in his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give.

he needs no eulogy from me or from any other man. he has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast. but when i think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, i am filled with an emotion of admiration i cannot put into words. he belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. he belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. he belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements. in 20 campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, i have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people. from one end of the world to the other he has drained deep the chalice of courage.

as i listened to those songs [of the glee club], in memory's eye i could see those staggering columns of the first world war, bending under soggy packs, on many a weary march from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle-deep through the mire of shell-shocked roads, to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of  god.

i do not know the dignity of their birth, but i do know the glory of their death.

they died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory.

always, for them: duty, honor, country; always their blood and sweat and tears, as we sought the way and the light and the truth.

and 20 years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dug

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