Armistice Day

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 73, 15 November 1940, Page 4

Armistice Day

HE fact that we have not been able, for obvious reasons, to hold the usual Armistice Day observances this year has led to the suggestion that November 11 until the war ends should be a day of national dedication. It is a suggestion that will attract those who have a feeling for "occasions" and leave others embarrassed and cold; nor is it possible to say which group is the larger. It is sufficient to remember that it does not matter very much how we march-singing and praying or in dogged silence-if we all march in the same direction. But there is one thing we must not do with Armistice Day. We must not convert it into a day of disillusionment or failure. We did not fail twenty-two years ago. We succeeded. We stopped, threw back, and finally crushed an assault on our independent existence. We succeeded because we endured, and it is blindness or weakness or both to suppose that we endured for nothing. However we used our victory afterwards, we did achieve victory; nor could the gloomiest observer of the years since 1918 argue that we had nothing left in 1939 but the memory of our sorrows and failures. We had lost much, but we had also learnt much, and we retained the moral and material strength to stand when all our neighbours fell. We are still standing. To lose sight of these things is to surrender to weariness and foolish fears. And yet those people are right who argue that to beat off this latest danger is not enough. We must be ready, when we have beaten it off, to go on with the job-beating off the social and political jackals who will gather on the field of victory. That at least is a war aim which it need not distract us to remember.