"BUT LIFE GOES ON"

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2901, 13 October 1916, Page 6

"BUT LIFE GOES ON"

HUMAN EMOTIONS ON THE • BATTLE-FRONT. Mr. Lloyd Goorgo (Secretary of State for War), addressing Welsh . citizen soldiers said: "You soldiers will be facing experiences when all the human emotions will reach a pitch which you havo never felt before." Writing from Franco on August 9 to his sister, Sergt. R. L. Armit (son of Mr. J. B. Armit, of Austin Street), who was wounded on September 15, and who was reported yesterday to havo died of his wounds, thus expresses some of his emotions:— ' "Sometimes it seems strange to mo that life, particularly tho social side of it, goes on in exactly tho sa'mo way as it did before tho war. It is not that

I think it should not do so, but the fact-that it does is rather incongruous. A man is killed or wounded. The stretcher-bearers carry him away. If ho is badly hit ho will murmur sometimes a pitiful request to bo put out of his misery. I pick up a paper, and within a few minutes am reading that a now picture theatre has been opened in Wellington, and that Mrs. Blank is holding a series of bridge parties. So the thing goes on, one's feelings becoming more and more bitter as time goes on, until there springs from the heart a determination to live for oneself and one's own folk, letting the rest of the world go to _ Hell. But time and an environment in which there is less strife will perhaps alter one's perspective. Let us hope so. A good deal happens out bore to change one's view of life.- but chief of all, one is impressed by the fact that there are illimitable depths in men, which, being sounded, give evidence of the presence of great good qualities we little believe men to have. There are, of course, occasional exceptions, such as the man who losej the benefits of comradeship in silent brooding over some fancied injustice. These men shut themselves out from the boon of human intercourse in which overy barrier is broken down. Then there is another class—an unfortunate class in the.colonial army. Ho is the young officer who gives himself airs which every man knows are assumed for the moment. I can imagine Maeterlinck, the Bolgian poet, describing _ them as souls aloof, shut out by their own folly and the false idea that one must stand apart in order to stand in authority, from communion with their fellows. But what Maeterlinck would say of them would hardly interest the .majority of them, since they havp probably little knowledge of his writings."

The lato Sergeant Armit was, before lie enlisted, chief reporter on the "Southland Times," and, had ho lived, would have been 27 years of ago on October 27 noxt. His Brother Colin is at the front, while another .brother, Mr. E. N. Armit, formerly of the Wellington Press, and more recently on the staff of the "Sydney Daily Telegraph," is at present in camp with one of the Australian Reinforcements.