STUNG TO ANGER

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21205, 30 August 1940, Page 2

STUNG TO ANGER

BRITAIN IS ALIVE DEMOCRACY AT ITS BEST WHOLE NATION RALLIES 1 From the Official War Correspondent attached to the New Zealand Forces in 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 voyage that until its last day was notable chiefly for the bad news which marked our halts. 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 deflferent ways equally so. We were told when we landed by over-talkative busybodies 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?) Little of the Abnormal We know now that, whatever the one-time truth of that accusation, 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. No dictatorship here, but an astounding demonstration of voluntary co-operation 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 of 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.” “Get Those Jerries” 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, let’s get those Jerries.” They jump a hedge and race across to capture the crew of an aeroplane 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.

And when they stand-to in defence of their soil that has known no alien tread for nigh on 900 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: “I was ir. Egypt, on Gallipoli—l lost my best cobber there —and in France. I’d go again if w’e were needed. But I never liked the ‘Gyppos.’ I 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’.”