EVENTS IN ENGLAND

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 August 1940, Page 2

EVENTS IN ENGLAND

NEW ZEALANDERS’ FIRST FOUR WEEKS

INCIDENTS IN DAILY LIFE.

SOLDIERS WHO MEAN BUSINESS. (From the Official War Correspondent attached to the New Zealand Forces in Great Britain). ALDERSHOT, July 15. Four weeks this afternoon since we dropped anchor in Home waters. Four weeks of high summer, rather too dry for the countryside and for urban water supplies—unseasonably dry, with August ahead. Yet four more perfect weeks it would be hard to find had the object of our coming here been to impress us with the beauty of England, to fill our hearts with love for her, to enlist us anew in her defence. Four of the most crowded weeks in history thrust upon us at the end of a long, tedious-tending voyage that until its last day was notable chiefly for the bad news which marked our halts. The tale of Europe over-run is for us a tally of British ports strung across the world. We are in Fremantle: Hitler swoops upon the Low Countries; we reach Cape Town: Leopold surrenders; we put out from Freetown: Italy declares war; we come to a Homeland harbour: and our signallers on the bridge pick up a lampflash from shore —France is suing for an armistice.

We are suddenly sobered after the pleasantries and light-heartedness of endless blue days at sea. While there is no doubting the warmth of the official welcomes extended to us, they lack the carnival setting common to such occasions; and we pay the more heed on that account. As we land on one coast of Britain, the war that has brought us knocks peremptorily at the other.

We have been twelve hours in the train when the blinds are drawn. A formality, we tell ourselves, and go on reading or playing cards. They made us darken ship at sea, and nothing happened! At one o’clock, when most are drowsy and some already asleep, the guard strides through: “All lights going out! There’s a raid on” Outside the moon shines brightly. When the lights go out we raise the blinds and watch. Searchlights, but they can be seen only when they touch a cloud; in the moonlight their beam is invisible. Shells bursting, high and far away towards the coast, twice. ••Ack ack,” say the cognoscenti.

We crowd the windows on the seaward side. The train is barely moving. Someone thought he heard an aeroplane, then. Tomorrow morning someone else is going to be sure he saw tracer bullets. We speed up a little, then crawl again, but see nothing further. Presently more of us go to sleep. At three o’clock the lights come on without warning, and there is a scramble to pull down blinds. It rouses Claude, who has been dead to the world since eleven o’clock. As the rest of us settle again to sleep, he is indignantly demanding of the carriage at large why he was not wakened to see the show.

All that was long ago, when if one spoke of the invasion of Britain he meant a Latin book; when “our island fortress” was'a figure of speech for the use of poets. Long ago? Four weeks. Not yet a month. But the moon is coming to the full again. And in the “Observer” this morning a bri-gadier-general, using a form of words that a year ago one would have used in looking forward to next century, tells us “there is now a reasonable chance that it will not take place”— before Friday! “IT.” A year ago a word of the films and the beauty advertisements. Now —but why continue? If "IT” should come, this let-ter-reaching you by the fastest available mail—will be as dead as the French Revolution, whose climax by rights they should have been celebrating in Paris today—one hundred and fifty-one years after —with singing and dancing and gay abandon. But come what may, come when it may, Britain will be alive: stung to glorious, righteous, irresistible anger by the threat to her shores. As this crisis presses upon them, the English people are magnificent; the Scots and the Welsh in their different ways equally so. We were told when we

landed, told by over-talkative busybodie's and unintending fifth-column-ists. that the people at Home did not realise they were at war. (What then, we thought, of the people in New Zealand?! We know now that, whatever the one-time truth of that occusation, it is true no longer. People here are not losing their heads. They are not giving up their civil work and standing idly around waiting for war. One may pass along the busy street of a county town, and, except for the men and girls in uniform, see little to indicate the abnormal. Factories are humming, fields are busy, shipyards are noisier than ever before. Work; striving; effort everywhere. But all of it directed to one end, the national end. Some of it aggressive military work; some of it passive defence; some of it, as formerly, keeping the export trades supplied; yet all in the wider service of the nation. No dictatorship here, but an astounding demonstration of voluntary co-opera-tion and willingness to take orders from an elected authority. Democracy under test, if you like; certainly democracy at its best.

The children are coming home from school, clattering down the road past camp, each with his little gas-mask over his shoulder. A few of the older girls, as is the way with girls, seem to be taunting that little fair-headed chap ol seven or thereabouts. “I’m not afraid of blinking Hitler," he pipes up. "even if he does send his bombers.” The papers record the same sentiment differently expressed by a child of Mayfair, a “seavacuee,” upon his arrival in New York. Asked if the British would win, he replied, “I most assuredly believe they will.” A woman walks out of her kitchen to arrest’ an armed Nazi airman who towers almost a foot above her. A workman is placidly painting an inn door when the landlord calls, "Come! Lets get those Jerries!” They jump a hedge and race across to capture the crew of a ’plane that has been shot down. True, these are only the outposts of war. But the response they have evoked from the ordinary people of Britain leaves no doubt how the great majority will face the terrors to come. The mothers and fathers, the wives and sisters of Britain, are not the I sort to fail their menfolk of the 1

8.E.F., the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force —“even if he does send his bombers.”

And when they stand-to in defence of their soil that has known no alien tread for nigh on nine hundred years, our little band of New Zealanders will stand and march with them. Men to most of whom this land was only a dream one month ago, yet men who are at home in it already, because it has awakened in them pride of ancestry, shown them the sources of human liberty, and wrapped the green tendrils of its beauty about their hearts.

Sergeants are not given to sentimentality, especially sergeants who wear three medals from the last war. Which makes this comment from one of them the more valuable. "1 was in Egypt, on Gallipoli—l lost my best cobber there —and in France. I’d go again if we were needed. But I never liked the Gyppos: ;1 hated Gallipoli; and I froze in France. If I have to fight for this country, I’ll fight because I MEAN it. And won’t Fritz know it!”