LOST YEARS.

Press, Volume LV, Issue 16414, 7 January 1919, Page 5

LOST YEARS.

The problem' of tlie "lost years" is an awkward one. A youth of 19 who enlisted in 1914 is now a young man or 23. Before the war lie waa a student or an apprentice; T/hen peace is signed Jig will be past the age of study, bub without tho equipment for a profession or a trade. ' ' ' ! ' But the problem has its brighter sulo. Much has been written against our universities. It is claimed that they did 1 not equip students for commerce or the professions and were inferior to Continental universities. This may have been so, but the war has shown that our 'varsities produced a type superior to the highly technical Hun—they produced men.

The war has swept universities out of existence temporarily, but ■ there is a wider 'varsity where men learn the groat truths of life —the university of the trenches,

It is a hard school. _ Men do not go in at one end as weaklings and emerge at the other as heroes, but I have never met a man who has not been affoctecl by trench life. All arc not improved, but each is altered for better or worsenalmost invariably lor better. The misery of the conditions depresses—that is where the weaker nature is overwhelmed and embittered —but the . incomparable comradeship of the spirit sustains. War is of the devil, but the cheerfulness of the British "Tommy,' 5 the courage that laughs at unutterable horrors, the heroism of tho soul that inspires the body to "carry on" despite tno weariness of the flesh, the charity that- men display in giving the last of their precious water to a man who has been hit —these are of God.

iNever in the world's history has Christianity been practised on such a scale as in the trenches. Men fight and kill, it is truo, but they fight for a great ideal and they kill what is vile. It is impossible to live for months acquainted with death and not to realise the pettiness of bickering over trifles. Perhaps to some the fighting man appears more callous in that for him death has lost much of its tragedy; but these fail to see the fighter's point—that the length of a man's span is of less import than what he did during it; that there is less tragedy in tho death of a man killed while fighting for his ideals than in the longer years of one who shirks his duty and dies an old man.

The fighter has lost ground in the details of bread-and-butter grubbing— he cannot add up figures in a ledger as swiftly as before, he is not- a skilled mechanic at the trade he left for the war, but his moral is higher. He has learned things that the stay-at-home has not. and his is the spirit- of camaraderie that was once only the possession of the fortunate few who had enjoyed a public school or Varsity training. After the war wherever men may meet the Question will bo not "What was your school?'' but "What was your regiment?"— Sidney Howard in London "Daily Mail.")