THIS WAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 70, 25 October 1940, Page 41

THIS WAR

(By

Mary Hedley

Charlton

HAVE made several attempts to write an article on the war; but so far it has been unsuccessful. I have written "sob stuff" all about brave hearts and lifted chins, weeping but hopeful mothers, the waving Union Jack, onward to victory, but there is too much of that. It does not seem to fit in with this strange new battle. And so I could not write, until yesterday when, as I sat in a café, I heard one woman remark to another between mouthfuls of tea: "Well, all I can say is, I hope my savings will be all right." Then something inside me boiled over and I knew what to write about, I would have liked to say to that teadrinker: "And Madam, may I ask, what are you saving for?" And in all probability she would have said, " For future security for me and mine." The majority of New Zealand people have good homes and three meals a day, and many have tucked away a cosy little bank account. But after all, what

is security? Or rather, what will security be? Even the dullest person to-day knows that this will be the bloodiest war the nations have known. We may bury our heads in the sand, but we all know what we are in for. We realise that England, to quote Yeats, has been "old and grey and full of sleep," but now she has rubbed the sand from her eyes and we are fighting, not for the future of our savings, but for a peace and brotherhood that the exhausted world is crying out for in her agony. And when it is over it is we who will have been reborn, weak and shaken. There will be no flags flying, no shouts of Victory, no Rule Britannia, at the end of this war, but there will be a humbleness the world has never known before, And in this new world we will not look up at White Roses and Laurels, and hear dazzling birds singing. The earth will be the same; it will be us, the people, who will be different. We will not have fine raiment or, Madam teadrinker, gold, But we may have a brain; not one to invent scientific wonders, but a brain to keep a peace for which the world has been forever seeking and striving. And it will surely be the ultimate end that we were placed upon the earth to find. * * a: We will look up from the blood and mud-covered ground to the sky, and it will shine as pure gold.