The Young Man’s World

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 86, 5 January 1935, Page 16

The Young Man’s World

“It is impossible to have been brought up in the ‘war atmosphere,’ to see one's parents behaving as no parents have ever behaved before or since, to hear of men being killed in thousands every day, to think in terins of death, and in many cases to see death actually being brought to one’s doorstep in an air raid, and then to say that the War meant nothing to us,” writes Mr. John Dugdale, in the “Daily Mail Year Book.”

“It is impossible to say, too, that the Peace which decided the future of Europe meant nothing to us. The War and the Peace Treaties, in fact, actually made our world for us. In this sense they mean more to us than they do to older people. But only in this sense. “The War, as a fact, means all this to us, but the causes of the War mean nothing. For it was not our war. It was fought by our parents for reasons which to them seem good enough, but to many of us to-day seem utterly unreal.

“We must have a sense of what I might call ‘international honour," something that transcends all .else, and makes us fight, if fight we must, to preserve civilisation rather than to preserve ourselves. For the younger generation is far more internationallyminded than ever its parents were. “It is partly because we have seen the results of a too narrow patriotism that does not think of the rest of the world, and partly, too, because we have been brought up in a world where the air is the dominant factor and countries have been brought together physically in a way that our fathers never dreamt possible.”