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Every seat in Appleton Chapel was filled yesterday at 12 o'clock when the service flag for Harvard men who died in the war was dedicated. President Lowell gave the dedication address and as he closed with "As a memorial of them here, friends have given to this chapel a banner which is now unfurled", the fringed red banner with a field of gold stars encircled by an appropriate inscription was unfurled from the choir balcony. In the upper left and right corners and in the lower center of the banner are the three open books respectively inscribed "VE", "RI", "TAS".
The banner was designed by Mr. Huger Elliott, principal of the school of Industrial Art at the Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia.
President Lowell's speech follows:
"When we meet on this anniversary of the Armistice, is it to celebrate the war, the victory, or the peace that followed? I do not know. But this insistent fact presents itself: that every thing man does must leave its trace indelibly in human lives; that an heroic deed has its effect upon the thoughts, and therefore on the acts, of other men. For us the value of the past lies in the future, and we measure that which has been done by what it makes us do. To honor those who have greatly lived and died is doubly right, for it is due to them and keeps before our eyes a beacon for ourselves.
"Five years ago the fighting ceased and men looked forward to a better world that has not come. Instead we see confusion and distress, ill-will and suffering; peoples still blinded and staggered by the smoke, and scorched by the embers, of the vast conflagration that swept across the earth. This might have been foreseen, for moral effort, when at an end, gives way to moral lassitude; and to hold the spirit on a lofty plane amid the sordid cares of peace is harder than in the actress of war. To do so we must keep our thoughts in tune with those who gave their lives upon the field, and died in glowing fervor for the cause they served. Without their courage, without their steadfastness of purpose, without their belief that the scourge of war can be taken from the earth, their work cannot be carried on.
"Though their exaltation of spirit be obscured, though men make light of the aspirations for making that shone upon their path, though profiteers grow rich upon the havoc wrought by war, though their own comrades use it to extort a dole; yet is their sacrifice of undying value and untarnished splendor. It stands for a faith that life is but a means to a still greater end, that life has an object More precious far than life itself. No selfishness of man or nation can, blot their sacrifice or mock then faith, for through that faith alone is life worth living.
"As a memorial of them here, friends have given to this chapel a banner which is now unfurled."
Professor E. C. Moore, chairman of the Board of Preachers of the University, conducted the services, and Professor A. T. Davison '06 was in charge of the music.
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