What I Saw at Queen Elizabeth's Coronation

On my way back to Lebanon, as the airplane bore us through the vast open sky, I was going over the short days, so full of events, that we had spent in London... How beautiful are the memories I keep of them.

The Queen's guests were the object of the care and attention of the personalities charged with guiding them and easing their movements, and these personalities showed the utmost graciousness and tact. We personally (we members of the Lebanese delegation) offered them our deep thanks for the signal services they rendered us in smoothing our stay.

As for the feeling that coronation day stirred in our souls, it was a feeling of power and grandeur; and it also stirred in us something of deep reverence.

The foul weather, the rains, and the freezing cold did not prevent millions of people from keeping places for themselves on the sidewalks from the evening of the day before the coronation.

We crossed the city at five o'clock on the morning of that day. From that early hour the whole city was already awake, and we watched with great admiration all these people waiting for the procession — some with their oilskins, some with their umbrellas, and others spreading out newspapers to lay on them the food they had prepared the day before. All of them — young and old, women and children — were making tremendous efforts to keep their places on the sidewalks so that they might see well the scenes of the festival and the passing of their beloved Queen. I knew of young men and girls who spent 27 hours in the rain so as not to miss any of the pomp of the royal procession.

But the Queen did not take her place in her gilded carriage until 10:26, as laid down in the program. This carriage was drawn by eight horses, mounted and escorted by horsemen of the guard in their beautiful ceremonial dress.

As for the royal guard in their sumptuous uniforms, they marched along the two sides of the route, their red coats mingling with the colors of the geranium flowers — red, they too — stretched along both edges of the road as well.

The procession began to extend along the avenue from eight in the morning, made up of contingents of sailors, army, and air force, and of the carriages carrying the official personalities and the princes of the royal family.

After the Queen left Buckingham Palace at 10:26, she arrived at Westminster Abbey at exactly eleven o'clock, having passed through the decorated streets and answered the cheers of the massed crowds.

As for the coronation ceremony, which was of the utmost solemnity, it was transmitted to the whole of England, to Europe, and to the United States by television; the Queen's movements and words were carried in the very same minute to all quarters of the inhabited world. Thus the world was able to see the Queen swear the oath in all reverence and emotion, receive the holy oil and the insignia of royalty, and receive the homage of the prelate who set the crown upon her head, and the homage of her husband and of the princes of the royal families.

At the moment the crown was set upon the Queen's head, the sound of cymbals and the voice of the choristers' anthems rang through the abbey, and the guardians of the throne placed upon their heads the coronets their pages had been carrying on cushions of silk. There were 7,500 persons in the abbey seeing these historic scenes with their own eyes, just as millions of human beings saw them too by television.

The Queen's guests and the foreign delegations, who had entered Westminster at eight in the morning, did not leave it until half past three, after being invited to the tables laid in the halls attached to Westminster.

The Queen's return to Buckingham Palace was escorted by units of the armies of the British Commonwealth: we saw the Indian army and the Australian army on horseback, and the New Zealanders, etc.... The cheers rose from both sides of the streets, and the cheering that accompanied the passing of Churchill was among the things that caught the attention.

In the evening the Queen was obliged to answer the cheers of the ever-growing crowds and to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace six times in succession, surrounded by her husband, her children, and her ladies-in-waiting.

And while the lights of rejoicing and festivity sparkled on the banks of the Thames, the temperature was dropping to zero — and yet it occurred to no one to pay any heed to the frost or the cold.

As for the lesson I drew from these splendid scenes, it is quite simply that England showed on this occasion, before the other nations and before the whole world, that she is firm in her strength.

Yet this display was not a matter of empty show; it had a meaning that goes back to virtues deep-rooted in the character of the British individual. Among these virtues are self-respect and respect for others, and respect for authority — all of them factors that lead to that marvelous organization, that endearing courtesy, the giving of self for public causes, spontaneous sacrifice, and the deep, sacred love for the homeland's history and its ancient traditions; they lead also to a jealous care for the sanctity of this homeland and its standing in the world, and thence to that love, rooted in the soul of the British individual, for the symbol of this homeland — namely, the throne.

And when we analyzed the flowering of these self-evident merits and qualities — self-respect, respect for others, and the spirit of organization — we felt them at first hand, whether in our conversations with personalities who have their place in British history and who received us in the historic palaces, or in the scenes of everyday life in the street or the restaurant, in the shop or the park... They are the qualities that lead to the rise of great nations.

For in England you find no counterfeit appearances... Time alone has done its work upon souls, so that they have ripened with a natural ripening, deep in its effect and without a trace of falseness, issuing in this marvelous flowering of a greatness whose roots took hold in the seeds of the quiet qualities latent in the British individual.