The War Is Here

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 77, 13 December 1940, Page 4

The War Is Here

HEN mines a week or two back sank two shipsin Bass Strait, the Australian Minister of Defence reminded his countrymen that the war had now reached them. If it was in Bass Strait it was in Pitt Street, he told them, and if it was in*Pitt Street it was in Bourke Street, and in Bourke itself, and back of Bourke. But it is many weeks since the war came to New Zealand waters, and when it reached Hauraki Gulf it reached Cook Strait and Foveaux Strait and all our sea-lanes and harbours potentially. The war has in fact been here since Germany crossed the frontiers of Poland, and our danger is neither greater nor less to-day than it suddenly became then. We should have known then-and a few did-that security's foundations had collapsed; but even if we had known most of us would not have understood. Fifteen months later some of us still do not know what the danger ‘is, since seeing is one thing and understanding another. Fifteen months after the beginning of the last war New Zealand had lost thousands of men. Although no enemy had then reached our shores, or ever reached them except under guard, although no bomb or shell had burst among us, and although no one ever lost a moment’s sleep through fear of a hostile landing, they were fortunate who had not begun to be afraid of telegraph messengers. But nearly everyone so far has been as fortunate as that in this struggle. Although the danger is so much greater than in 1914-1918, the signs have been so few, so remote, so scattered, that they have had no chance against our habits, appetites, and normally slumbering minds. And that, up to a point, is wholly good. If the choice had to be made it would be better to go to sleep at one’s post than to stampede. One might still wake up and fight. But the good citizen does neither. He does not lose his head when a bomb bursts near home, but he does not think it clever to call a bomb a cracker. He knows that the war is here,