PROUD & SILENT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 August 1943, Page 4

PROUD & SILENT

WAR BURDEN OF BRITISH PEOPLE EXPERIENCES NEVER TOLD FIGHT AGAINST NAZI BARBARISM “A newcomer here in London, a bit forlorn, and hoping for news from home, is likely to haunt the office where letters and cables come in,” said Maxwell Anderson in a 8.8. C. broadcast. “There is a little woman there, behind one of the counters, who was very kind and friendly lately toward a lonely and somewhat homesick American. It never occurred to him that she herself had reasons for loneliness or worse. She turned a bright face toward the world. It was from someone else that he learned her story, and quite by accident. Her husband was a pilot and was killed in the first year of the war. Two years later she had fallen in love again—and the man she loved was killed in action. The Week when she had been so kind to the visiting American she had heard that her only child, a daughter, was dead in far-off Australia. She went to work as usual and did her work as usual, and managed a smile when she helped a fellow out. And this is no isolated case. They are fantastically heroic, these English. “When you first see the London of 1943 you wonder where the inhabitants can be living—among those gutted and shaken empty buildings that look down on you nearly eevrywhere. And when you study the rationing regulations, you wonder what they are living on. But the people and the traffic move so imperturbably through the scarred and wounded streets that you soon take the situation quite for granted. All the services function. Everybody goes to work. Everybody finds a place to live —and eats and gets along. In fact the people get along with such calm mat-ter-of-fact faces and such a businesslike air that an American, coming here now, is greatly misled. He's inclined to believe that the burden and the tragedy which have been borne by the English during the last three years may have been over-estimated. Then, if he’s lucky, he begins to see beneath the surface. “The world will never know what they have gone through to hold off the German war-machine and keep their liberty. The world won’t know because these people will never tell. They’re a proud and silent folk, keeping their griefs to themselves. There is hardly a man or woman or child in England today who has not lived an epic story during these last three years. You will never hear it from them. The postman who comes toward you on the street — an old man, for if he were young he would be in military service—he has sent three sons to war; only one is living. His wife was killed in the first bombing of London. He has received two medals for rescuing victims from demolished houses. He has never shown those medals. He has never told his personal history. Somebody else had to tell it. Most of these heroic private battles are quietly buried, and will be buried forever with the actors who took part in them. “Now it may be that our American boys stationed in England on duty have acquired some of this British phlegm, or it may be that contact with actual fighting conditions makes a soldier’ talk less freely—at any rate the American soldiers and officers whom I have met say little about their own troubles. And those who have done the most and run the greatest risks in the war are those who say least about what they have given up or what they have accomplished.”