Twelve Thousand Miles

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 76, 6 December 1940, Page 4

Twelve Thousand Miles

N Page 3 of this issue we print an article which amplifies the briefer cabled report about conditions created by air-raids. Since then the problems of public health have become intensified, as Mr. Calder suggested in September they would. We have news of endurance strained as environment has surely never before strained the endurance of mankind and womankind. It seems to be bad news. Certainly it is horrible news. In fact it is the worst news the human race has heard since life first began to walk upright. But it was good that it should come at last to New Zealand. People with imagination have been guessing something of the trials to which war is putting those it is touching most closely: but the most lively imagination does not easily span 12,000 miles of ocean. And even the imaginative, seeing day by day the same headlines and reading day by day the same news, have been taking the war in daily doses that weakened in effect the more often they were administered. Now, at last, there is news that makes the business more than mere words. "Hundreds of people," says The Times, "pass the greater part of their days under these conditions of stench, filth, vermin, and darkness." To such plain facts as these our minds can reach out, no matter how firmly the bodies of many may be anchored in unwanted safety under the Southern Cross. It was bad that a failure to appreciate the situation should have made such news; but it is good that we have heard, even if we hear two months late. We may now begin to realise that we are fighting for more even than plain bread and butter. We are fighting for the right to live, and live we must before we can enjoy any of those less tangible things which seem, until life itself is tested in blood and hardship, to make life worth living,