WAR & IDEALS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 November 1943, Page 5

WAR & IDEALS

HOPE OF RESULTS THIS TIME. “At eighteen I was in the mud and blood of Flanders. I fought at Ypres, Hill Sixty, Messines; I saw the first German attack with liquid fire. I went through half a dozen gas attacks —the last laid me out. I was blown up by mines, bombed by Zeppelins and aeroplanes, and almost drowned in the Mediterranean when a U-boat torpedoed the transport ship. I went to Malta, to Egypt., to India, and there, just after the Armistice, found myself mixed up in a new war, with the Afghans on the north-west frontier. Then I went back to my job in civil life—journalism. I ■tried to see what I could do with mypen to make the world safe for the democracy and liberty we’d been fighting for. But it seems that I and my band didn’t know so much about keeping safe that peace we’d fought for. We’d got rather mixed in our ideas and our ideals, in the years between. For we who fought the last war to end war now see our sons and our friends’ sons fighting the same battle over again, against the same enemy, in this war. But in the present battle I’m hot a fighting man—l'm just trying to do my bit by helping as well as I can, to tell the free peoples of the world how the battle goes. Younger men have taken my place in the firing lines, younger men with ideas and ideals just as I had when I marched against the Germans twenty-nine years age. But this time they and I are going to see that these ideals are carried out.” —Bill Myatt, in a 8.8. C. Radio News Reel talk, “Old Soldier.”