FOR VALOUR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 December 1941, Page 4

FOR VALOUR

NEW ZEALANDER’S EXPLOITS. CONTEMPT FOR DANGER. In the Bagdad of the Arabian Nights it used to be ordered that the story of any notable achievement should be written down in letters of gold. Is gold good enough, we can but "ask, for the achievements of two New Zealanders who have been awarded the Victoria Cross for valour? asks “The Times.” The story of SecondLieutenant Upham covers nine days. During the whole time he was suffering from dysentery and could eat very little. The ordinary mortal, who knows to his shame how a little indigestion can upset both his eye and his nerve on the golf course, will feel that on the least eventful of those nine days Mr Upham’s courage was superhuman. Courage, moreover, in this case, meant something far more complex and intellectual than was demanded, say, of even the officers in the charge of the Light Brigade. All the time, and not only on the fifth of those nine days when, painfully wounded, bruised and starved, he bagged his brace by shamming dead, or on the last day when by exposing himself he tricked the enemy into doing the like, he was, thinking, planning, pitting his wits against the German strength. We all like ■to think that in the excitement of battle we should be able to do deeds of which the mere thought turns us cold in repose; but the story of those nine days includes not only the hour after hour of silent endurance through which discipline helps to fortify the least heroic, but also the deliberate courting of danger in cold blood for the sake of the platoon, of the Army, of New Zealand, of the British Empire and the free world. And Sergeant Hulme, that deadly stalker of snipers, he too has won his V.C. as much by his brains as by his contempt for danger.