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My brethren and sisters: I am very grateful for the unexpected privilege of attending this great conference. I am proud to be the messenger to bring love and greetings from the saints of the British mission, the people who have endured so much during the last five years of war. These people have seen their homes, villages, towns and cities destroyed, but have carried on in the face of difficulties which might have discouraged most of us. I say I am proud to represent them here today, and I feel that their faith and their courage, their loyalty and fortitude stand out as an ensign to the Church. I am sure, too, that the members of the other missions of Europe when their story can be told, will be found to have done the same kind of work and exhibited the same faith and courage. We will be glad to call them brothers and sisters.
The work over there, during the war period, has been under the able direction of President Anastasiou. He and his associates have done an outstanding job during the time that missionaries from here were not permitted to go there and, as I think, in recognition of his fine service, the Lord has opened the way for him to come to Zion with his family. So from the saints of Britain, we bring greetings, love and blessings.
I am very glad, too, to bring a very brief report concerning the work which has been and is being done by your sons and brothers. It has been my privilege to meet thousands of them. We have met them in the villages, in the towns and cities of Britain. We have met them in the branches and districts and at the mission home. We have seen some of them in the hospitals and many of them in their camps. We have seen them as they went out on their dangerous missions, and we have seen them as they came back. We have heard their stirring testimonies and have been inspired with the enthusiasm that seemed to characterize their work. We have heard them talk of home, and pray for their loved ones. We have heard them pray for the authorities of the Church, for the leaders of the nation. I would like to say to you brothers and sisters, you have reason to be proud of these fine young fellows. We have met them in the woods, out under improvised shelters, in the cold and the rain of that unconquerable climate of England, and under those conditions we have felt a warmth and a comfort that sometimes are missing under conditions that ought to be more favorable. We have met these men, as I say, under these conditions and have labored with them, and nothing in my experience has tended more to cement my faith in God and in the fact of the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ than to see that Gospel in action in the lives of these men. We hear from them from Arabia and Serbia, from Egypt and the Holy Land, from Africa, India, from Burma and China, from the Philippines, the Aleutians and the many islands of the Pacific. We hear from them from all over the continental United States and in her far-flung outposts. We hear from them on those floating islands, our great navy, and in all of these places, these men are meeting as regularly as conditions will permit. They are singing the songs that you sing, and they are praying to God and expressing gratitude to him for home and for loved ones and Church.
Yesterday I got a letter from Iwo Jima, that blood-soaked island which has just been conquered, and one of our own boys who took part in it said that he and a group of Latter-day Saint men had met on the beach there and with uncovered heads had administered the sacrament to one another and thanked God for their deliverance. Then he added as a postscript to his letter, "Please tell President Grant that we out here are praying for him." Can you match that for love and loyalty and devotion to a cause?
Now, brethren and sisters, these men are coming home shortly, thousands of them. There are enough men out there, of this Church, to fill this building to overflowing ten times, and they are coming back. We hope we will get some vision of the responsibility and task which confronts us as we are called upon to meet them, to greet them, and to help them.
These men will not be the same boys as you saw go out. These men have gone out into conditions which many of us know not of. These men have had responsibility. They have traveled in far places. They have been flying these great ships with millions of dollars worth of cargo. They have had the lives of their fellows in their care. They have had to make decisions upon which the lives of thousands depended. These men have been seasoned, and they are coming home mature. Some of them will come home wounded in their bodies, having lost limbs, eye-sight, or hearing. These will be ministered to by the best that science can provide, and the government will do everything possible for them, but there are others who will come home with unseen wounds, and they will need help, too. We who have remained in the harbor must learn to understand something of the problems confronting these men who went out on the high seas. No sailor who does not sail his ship out into the seas will ever criticize the one who does, even though he comes back with the sails of his ship tattered, the hull dented and the mast broken. They will not criticize him because they know what he has gone through.
I pray that God will help us to understand something of what these men have been enduring, and by the help of him who gave his life on the cross for the wounded and the sick and the weary and the heavy laden, by the help of his spirit may we attack this great problem of the rehabilitation of our men. I would like to express and send to these men, through you parents who are listening in, this comforting message: The General Authorities under the First Presidency are making plans now and setting up an organization and program so that we may supplement the great rehabilitation program of our nation. Provision is being made to meet these men and to help them become reestablished.
I pray that God will help them and us, that we may do our part to uphold the standards of the Church and that they, upon returning, will bring to the problem of reconstruction the same faith and courage and hope which have inspired them while they have been away. I said they have often spoken of home. Someone has written just a line, a prayer which could have been spoken by one of them and has doubtless been thought by many. It is as follows:
O God, I did not come out to this war
From a park bench or a rented room,
I came from home.
And I brought with me family words:
Garden, crib, fireplace, front door,
Wife, Little fellow.
Now they are all mixed up with war jargon:
Jeep, tank, foxhole, tommygun, blitz.
Help me, God, to keep my thinking straight.
Grant the impossible.
Make home, our home,
Seem real--in battle.
Show me how to sort out my thoughts
And use the words about home,
Even when I'm sitting in a swamp,
Hours at a time, not daring to move
More than my eyes. They'll keep me sane.
I'll be a better human. And just now
When fighting is my job,
I want to stay human.
It didn't take a war to show me how I love
My home. But it has taken a war to show me
How it will feel to walk out of Hell
Straight to a paradise that men call home.
O God, let ours rest under the shadow of your hand!
Amen.
God grant that in our homes and in our communities provision may be made for these returning thousands of our boys, that they may uphold here at home as they have out there in the main the standards of the Church. I bear witness to its truth, to the divinity of this work. I bear witness to the fact that these men who are our leaders are inspired of God, I pray that under their direction we may be able to carry out this splendid program for the rehabilitation of our service men, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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