The Price

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 103, 13 June 1941, Page 4

The Price

T is natural that questions should be asked ] about the fighting in Greece and Crete. Questions are being asked. People wish to know in New Zealand, they are demanding assurances everywhere, that the cost of these battles has been properly incurred. Was defeat foreseen? Was the action taken justified by the results? These are not merely natural questions-they are necessary; and the Government has shown its appreciation of the situation by calling Parliament together this week. But it is one thing to ask questions, and another to indulge in recriminations; one thing to be sore, another thing to complain of the pain, and blame others for it. It is not merely astonishing, but pitiable and depressing, that anyone should think such thoughts as those expressed by the correspondent on this page who complains that New Zealanders have been given the "roughest stuff" in the Middle East and British troops the easy places. If it were permissible to argue such questions, it would be found that the facts lie all the other way. In Greece and Crete New Zealanders have been in rough places, gone to them proudly and endured them gloriously, but they did not go alone to them, they did not remain alone in them, and for nearly the whole course of the war previously they had remained in comparative safety. If there is one thing that would worry them more than anything that has yet happened to them it would be a suggestion that they should be given any kind of preferential treatment but the honour of being first into the "roughest stuff" and last out. Let us not forget what war is; what happened to our division on the Somme and at Passchendaele; and what has happened to so many other divisions during the present war. Above all let us not forget the work of the navy, of the air force, of the mine-sweepers, and of the merchant marine, without which no New Zealand soldier would ever have arrived in Greece or Crete, or even have come safely out. We are fighting one of the great battles of history-perhaps the greatest of all. For weeks and months yet the tide may flow against us, as it flowed against us almost without a pause for nearly three years after 1914. Instead of thinking that we are taking more than our share of the misery, we should realise — and the overwhelming majority do-that there can be neither fair nor unfair shares in a struggle into which everybody should be putting his last ounce of strength.