WAR’S USELESSNESS

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1053, 18 August 1930, Page 14

WAR’S USELESSNESS

INFANTRYMAN-CLERIC’S DENUNCIATION MORAL IN A PICTURE “What 1 have to say is not an emotional outburst because of a vivid picture 1 have seen. I speak because I know from my experience as an infantryman in the late war that the picture is a true one, and the whole world ought to know it. I claim tonight that the whole idea of war among the peoples of the earth is wrong; and no one knows it better than those who have gone through it.” The speaker was the Rev. E. T. Olds, who gave an address in the Strand Theatre last evening under the auspices of the Methodist Central Mission on the film “All Quiet.” “Looking at that picture I felt that something within me which 1 thought was dead was coming to life,” said Mr. Olds. “1 had forgotten to a degree the horror of those past years, its numbing, paralysing fear, the maddening, ceaseless din of the artillery, the sickening butchery; but as I looked at the picture I lived those days again. Here was war in all its stark reality and brutality, stripped of all its cheap trappings; and I felt again as thousands of the men on active service felt 'this is something that the whole world ought to know.’ “But the world doesn’t know. I sometimes think the world doesn’t want to know; it’s afraid to know. It would sooner hear the rattling of the sword, and listen to the political claptrap about guarding our national honour with the life’s blood of our best manhood. Only those who have been through the hell of war can tell the world what war is; and they won’t tell —there is a way in which they can’t tell. I think that is one of the most ghastly things about war. It takes its toll of millions of the world’s best manhood—in the late war over 3,500,000 soldiers of the Allies alone lost their lives, and those who still live on it kills in another way. Only a couple of days ago I was speaking to a father whose son had been away at the war and he was saying, T can’t get my boy to say a word about it.’ Of course, bo can’t. Nobody would understand if ho did talk. That’s the tragedy of it. MISUNDERSTOOD “But the film speaks. It tells you what the soldier will not for fear of being misunderstood. It tells the truth. People have said to me that it is too horrible to see, that we ought to forget it. We ought not to forget it! It is what war really is. I consider that every man and woman in every land should see this picture. It would make them think; it would straighten out a lot of their mental kinks on the subject. Admittedly it is hard to those who have lost loved ones; but it is a thousand times a worse tragedy, a worse crime to keep silent, to smother up the facts of the case, and let the world through ignorance drift helplessly into another war which will be ten times more awful in its desolation. “It is the people, the people of every land who have to pay the awful price of war. and it is only the people of every land who can stop it. We must rise and say that this thing shall not be. Never again will we be duped into offering our best as a sacrifice to the vanity of the world’s overlords. “The greatest criminals in the world are not the law-breakers who fill our gaols; they are those men in influential positions who seek to stir up strife and hatred among the nations of the earth. Many of them are honoured as great patriots, but they are traitors —traitors to humanity. The people of the world have no hatred for each other; but ther are those who are always seeking war, and they arc at their old game again. They are demanding bombing planes and poison gas, chemicals that will wipe out cities full of people, and they will get them while the people sleep. But they can never get them while the people are awake, never get them as long as the people the wide world over let it be known that not another penny, not another mother’s son will be sacrificed to the grim god of war. “There are many suggestions in the way of remedy, education, a league of all nations to outlaw war, the breaking down of all tariff barriers being among them. The key to the situation lies in the hands of a Man who lived 1.900 years ago, a Jew, and yet One who belongs to every race and every age; the great internationalist, the universalist—Jesus Christ. ‘Love your enemies,’ He said. ‘Bless them that curse you.’ To many it seems a tame way, but it is the only .way. Hatred must give place to love; trust must take the place of fear. We have never yet tried out the way of Jesus Christ; but His is the last word. We must try it out. or we shall perish from the face ot the earth.”