A Book For Soldiers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 37, 8 March 1940, Page 12

A Book For Soldiers

N the pocket of every soldier who went to war twenty-five years ago, and somewhere among the belongings of most of those who returned, was a New Testament. If it was not often read, it was seldom thrown away. To-day the case is a little different. Every camp and troopship has its library, and no soldier reads the Bible because the alternatives are that book or none. He has a wider and better choice in many cases than he has ever had before, and if he is embarrassed by his riches he has a librarian to help him how to enjoy them. Only when he is marching or fighting will he be reduced again to the books he can carry in his tunic pocket. There are, however, single-book minds, as there are single-track minds, and minds that have no tracks at all. A man may be an excellent soldier without knowing, or caring, whether Ulysses was a Greek Prince or a renegade Irishman; but he will not be a good fighter in the present war if he does not know why the war goes on. This of course he can know without reading books, but if seeing the facts in print helps him, he may get most of them in 2 little book that reached New Zealand last week and will go comfortably ‘nto iis overcoat pocket: Why Britain Is At War, by Harold Nicolson. Mr. Nicolson is intentionally a propagandist. His purpose is to prove that we are fighting in a good cause, and he finds no difficulty in saying that self-preservation is @ good cause, and that we are fighting to preserve others as well as ourselves. He is however most effective in showing what we are fighting against, and the Government might do worse than order enough copies of his exposure of Hitlerism to have one for every soldier in camp. It is earnest enough to place beside the New Testament, and lively enough to compete with a thriller,