Card of the Day: The King’s Pilgrimage to the Graves of British Soldiers

And there lay gentlemen from out of all the seas
That ever called him King.
'Twixt Nieuport sands and the eastward lands where the Four Red Rivers spring,
Five hundred thousand gentlemen of those that served their King.
—from the poem 'The King's Pilgrimage', by Rudyard Kipling


In 1922, King George V made a pilgrimage to the graves of the British soliders who had been killed during the grueling Great War. This event was chronicled in a poem by Rudyard Kipling. The pilgrimage is commemorated in the sixteenth card in the series of 1935 Silver Jubilee cards by Wills Cigarette company.

The reverse of the card reads:

At Terlincthun War Cemetery on May 13th, 1922, the King concluded a pilgrimage to the graves of soldiers of the British Empire who fell in France and Flanders. The burial ground looks from the high cliffs near Boulogne across the Channel, and on clear days, the white cliffs of our own cost shine clearly. At the Cross of Sacrifice, standing with the Queen, and important representatives of the British and the French armies, the King spoke movingly of the dead, whose graves girdle the “whole circuit of the earth,” and who, in France, “lie in the keeping of a tried and generous friend.

The Terlincthun Cemetery, Wimille, is in Pas de Calais France, near where the first rest camps for Commonwealth soldiers were founded at the start of the First World War. A large monument called the Cross of Sacrifice towers above the graves.