CHILDREN'S MEMORIES & WAR

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2497, 25 June 1915, Page 2

CHILDREN'S MEMORIES & WAR

A SLGGESTION. One of the acute domestic problems ?! ? ■~ ! 'a r ' IOIV to interpret it to the children that it may mako them rir 'i women. It is a more difficult problem than at first appears. A man must be over oO now to liavo any recollections of the Franco-Prussian War; probably ho must bo over 60 to have recollections that aro worth anything, unless circumstances throw him into tho actual war zone. If llio ordinary Briton who was ton years old | in 1870 will sift his memories of those days, he will find them almost incredibly lew and trivial. This war, of course, conies nearer home to English boys of to-day, and one assumes that t'hoy must in after years reniomber more of it. At least tliev will remember tlie tramp of khaki armies and how members of their own families went to fight, and, it mav be did not come back". Rut if one listens to boys' talk about the war it gives one glimpse of the difficulties:— oil Germans shoot at women ? "Sometimes lam afraid tlioy have done it." "And do they hit tliem when they aim at them?" "That depends on how far away they are and whether they aim carefully." "If a German was about a hundred yards away from a woman and didn't aim very carefully, would he hit her?" Or a K aiii —"Are German trenches longer than llussian ones?" "Some may be Ion" and some short." "Well, is' a middle" sized Gorman t.renoh longer than a middle-sized Hussian one? They talk, the children, of millions of men fighting as they speak of millions of sparrows in the garden. War is but a multiplication of single combats, and their minds can grasp but a few at a time; and all higher numbers—twenty or a trillion—are meaningless. No battle ill Flanders is ss important as the battle on the playroom floor with their own tin soldiers; and if you tell them of the death of one whom they knew, the brother qf a playmate with whom they have romped and talked, they listen with an impatient shamefacedness, ask whether he also shot tho man who shot him, and return to their own warfares. The incapacity of the boy's mind to grasp the cencopts of liberty and truth and justice, the principles of international law and of ethics, is, of course, older than Aristotle. Doubtless it is well that it is so. But, perhaps, judiciously and not didactically, lest the war become no more than lessons, one can by concentration impress one single central fact on the plastic minds, the fact that England cho6e as her cause for drawing the sword the defence of her word signed to a scrap of paper, and that she did so because no Briton, man or boy, can ever dishonour himself, his country, or his King by breaking his word in great things or in small. In later years they can read in books bow gallantly their uncles, flieir brothers, and their fathers fought, with all about the war itself. It - will he enough almost to repay to the Empire in the next generation all her loss if that one conviction can be intonvoven in tho very fabric of the children's brings now, to grow with them as tlieir minds and bodies grow.—l/ondon "Times."

Among the Southland men mentioned in the casualty lists last week were two sons of llr. David Jenkins, of Gap Road, AVinton. The eldest (Sergeant Sidney AV. S. Jenkins) wa« born at Gap Iload in 1892, and was educated at the AVinton School, where ho was at one time dux. He was. always keen on military matters, and passed from the school cadets into the AA'inton Volunteers. He joined the Territorials when the Volunteer system was superseded. He was a crack shot, and besides winning his marksman's badge, he was in 1913 runner-up for_ the Southland Territorial championship. The second son was Private Cecil William Jenkins. He was born at Gap Road in 1894. He also was educated at the AA'intor. School. After leaving school he followed the occupation of cheesemaker. He was well known as a cyclist, and was seen in many track and road events.