CARRY ON!

Taranaki Daily News, 17 September 1918, Page 5

CARRY ON!

ALL WILL BE WELL. |tEW ZEALAND EDITOR'S CHEERING MESSAGE. By Telegraph.'—Press Association. Wellington, Last Night. Tha following message has been received from Mr. Fred Pirani, one of the proa delegates visiting Britain at the invitation of the Imperial authorities. London, Sept. 13. The editorial mission returned to London to-day, after an extensive tour of Vittce and Flanders. The New Zealand dnliptfi end indeed, the whole party of overseas editors—have been greatly itttpnased by What they were privileged : to eee and to learn on and behind the . historic western front. We have seen the great war machine working at high frtuure,- a marvel of stupendous and eomplicsted organisation, running with teeming miraculous smoothness and preeUioA. We have seen our splendid men at work, talked with them about their experience*, listened with delight to their eagerly-told tales of some other fellows' dauntless valor—Sever by any chance do they enthuse about what they them■elves have done—and discovered new inspiration in their cheerful optimism. Here there in the semi-confidential privacy of mess room or billet one heard Whispers of sins of omission and comfriminn, stories of somebody's alleged blunders, but these are matters which, if they do not lack foundation in fact, must be left to be "washed up" 1 after the war. Meantime they arc but incidents more or less inevitable in happenings in the world-redeeming enterprise to which we have set our hands. When we left New Zealand (he Hon Was shaking his mailed fist at a threatened Paris, and making the world gasp lest by hia prodigal onslaught he should wrest the long-coveted Channel from the heroic defenders. The spring carnival of slaughter was in full swing, and the issue waa still in doubt. What has happened in the interim you in New Zealand know, Our gallant troops have sprung from the defensive to the offensive. They here sweat back the Huns, and are still pushing forward. Thousands upon thousands of prisoners caged behind the Allied lines testify to the Buceess of their heroii? operations. Paris, the beautiful, is still the undisturbed capital of La Belle Trance; the Oh*™* ports still fly the Allied flags; America haa continued to make good; tritaafei* still rule* the waves; and the end, though not yet, is nearer than—but there rm neither a prophet nor the sen of a prophet. This thought I can say, for it is written large on all that we have seen—onto us is to be the victory. Everywhere—in the base camps, in the billets behind the lines, in the battered and blood-stained trenches, on the crowded foil, everywhere amidst this welter of Mood tad pabi; aye, even in the hospitals, on the wan, drawn faces of the battle-torn heroes, is written Tnto us is to- be the victory." Why! Because the salvation of humanity and the preservation of democracy demand it; because right must prevail over might; because, despite our national sins and shortcoming!, we are in this fight on the side of God. and, under His almighty captaincy d»feat is unthinkable. No man could walk over the ground hallowed by the life-blood of so many of oar kidfolk without being touched by the overwhelming sadness of it aIL War from near at hand looks so tenribly different. It is frightful. It is ghastly; yet it is wonderfully and awfully grand. It calls the imagination to the soul-stirring harmony of the Dead March as it might be played by a thousand mighty bends, followed by the Glory Bong as rang by all the sons of men in union with the countless choirs of Heaven. That i» -why we editors have .come back from-the western front with the song of victory on our lips. We have been where things- petty and little pale into insignificance; where only the one big tiling counts; where the brotherhood of man, welded in the furnace of pain and suffering, finds its fullest and truest expression, and where, in the inscrutable wisdom of Uie Omnipotent there is being worked out a new and better order of things. Our message to you all is: "Carry en; all will be well."