To Norway

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 44, 26 April 1940, Page 12

To Norway

\ X JE recall on other pages in this issue the contribution of Norway to drama, literature, and music; its fame in polar exploration; and its humanitarian work among the refugees of the last world war. Here we draw attention to its contribution to the art of living. It must be remembered that nature gave Norway almost nothing to begin with but physical beauty-mountains and forests, rivers, lakes, and moors, but hardly any soil. Even where the soil is sufficient for cultivation, the sunshine is insufficient to guarantee the harvest. Grain crops are grown, but never in sufficient quantity to meet domestic needs; and the growing, ripening, and harvesting, when allowance has been made for the nvidnight sun, would make a New Zealand farmer sick with worry. Tasks that take a day here take a week there, where every week is precious; but in spite of such handicaps Norway, until the other day, was a prosperous, contented, and truly civilised democracy whose people had come to terms with their environment. Nor is it a sufficient explanation that what nature withheld with one hand it gave with the other. It certainly gave timber and many (but never enough) minerals, unlimited water power, and the most magnificent harbours; filled the sea with fish; and sent a warm current to keep the ocean gates open in winter. But even in this industrial age the population has never reached three million. The culture of Norway, and the wisdom, have been dredged from the sea, hewn out of the forests, coaxed from the thin and hungry soil.-Its civilisation is the expression of people made kindly and tolerant by generations of struggle with a pitiless environment. They had to learn wisdom or perish, and they have not perished. And now Germany is trying to fasten on them again the shackles, physical and spiritual, from which they have so painfully freed themselves. Germany will not succeed. But we must not forget, while we fight beside the Norwegians, that we are fighting with rather than for them. Our northern campaign is being waged, not merely to drive Germans out of Norwegian fiords, but to drive gangsterism out of Norwegian civilisation,