Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star FRIDAY, January 28, 1921. AN EMPIRE'S EX-SOLDIERS.

Hokitika Guardian, 28 January 1921, Page 2

Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star FRIDAY, January 28, 1921. AN EMPIRE'S EX-SOLDIERS.

Next month a conference will be held I in South Africa of delegates from all ! ex-soldiers’ Associations throughout tho Empire arid Field Marshal Earl Haig will preside over it. There is something moving, remarks a Sydney paper, in the i spectacle of the earstwhile great man of j G.H.Q. in France presiding over a conj gross representing all the mighty army he directed in war, in order to thrash out a general policy, with the return of peace for *‘‘a square deal for ox-sol-dieiis.” Every man in tho Empire ! knows in his heart tTiat there stunt!d be jno such necessity. What is wrong? In the main# it is the old story. Governments and Parliaments and a variety of public interests, while in danger of going under the German yoke, promised everything to the men who threw up their civilian careers to fight for our common safety. The hysterical sentiment during the war over “our brave boys,” all proclaimed heroes on sight, was early distrusted by many soldiers whose cynicism has proved only too well-founded. That extravagance of emotion has been equalled in a vast number of cases only by the shame less indifference of the same people towards the soldiers’ welfare when the army brought hack the hard-won peace. Wo have seen a few instances of it in Australia—fortunately only a few. The case of the ex-soldier in Britain, on the contrary, seems to he a had one. Numbers of officers and rankers of the army which saved the Empire are stranded, starving, begging for employment, in the old country. Within the army and outside of it there were many critics of Earl Haig during tho war as tho remote head of a glorified head of a glorified staff which lived in comfort far from the spasmodic misery of the firing-line. But he refutes those critics to-day by the fashion in which he is spending all his energies and resources in the cause of reinstating the ex-soldiers in civilian life. He has done nothing else since the Peace Conference. “I called on Britain for these mbn,” he says in effect, “and while I live I will exhort Britain to take thorn back.”

There are no party politics in his campaign. Apart from a few notable exceptions, says Earl Haig, the commercial interests in Britain havo been niggardly and the conduct of certain trade unions is a shame and a disgrace. Disabled men (200,000 or them), or ableI bodied men seeking work—it is all the same. Unskilled men are barred from the trade unions unless they go through an impossibly long apprenticeship. For j ex-rankers there is a small Government allowance against unemployment; for 1 ex-officers there is none. “The country and the Government,” says Karl Haig, '“still appear to believe that the officers for whom we are appealing are of the same class as they were before the war—men with private means or with friends to look after them. That is rot the ease as to 99 per cent of the exofficers.” Such is the ultimate end of every promotion* from the ranks in a national army ! Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have relumed to the land they saved to find that there are no houses to spare for them, no means to save their families from starvation, no work graciously granted them, no share left for them of what prosperity remains (through their exertions against the enemy) of a proud and rich country. They are told even that there is no room for them in Britain. One big London paper proposes seriously that this numerous cold-shouldered remnant of a heroic army should bo carried away and settled in East Africa. Instances of ox-colonels re-appearing in * civilian life as village constables or rail- ] way porters simply ‘show how far the ' army net was dragged for men in tbe time of need. The real tragedy is of youths taken to the war almost from school and thrown back on the streets of the big cities; of older men who left their wives and children to the temporary care of the nation, and sacrificed their careers in the common cause, and are now ordered to redeem the one without any hope offered of chance to redeem the other. Fortunately New Zealand has a better record than the Motherland in her treatment of the ox-sol-diers, and we can only hope there are hotter times ahead for the British soldier lie will desesves it.