They Also Fight

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 117, 19 September 1941, Page 4

They Also Fight

HE Prime Minister’s return to New Zealand rounds off a tale of experiences | such as no Prime Minister in New Zealand has ever known before. Mr. Seddon visited New Zealand soldiers in South Africa. Mr. Massey and Sir Joseph’ Ward visited a New Zealand army in France-a_ visit marked by some discomfort and not wholly free of risk. But by comparison with the journey of Mr. Fraser those were Cook’s tours. The world was then civilised and in general subject to law. To-day it is a world of brigands, with no safety on the sea, little on the land, and none in the air. A Prime Minister is no longer a man who directs his country’s activities from a safe place. There is no safe place for him anywhere while his countrymen fight. It is total war. And total war takes us back, not merely to the Dark Ages, but to the beginning of organised history. It makes soldiers of civilians, and scatters death among women end children. And if there is no security for the helpless and the innocent, none for the servants of mercy, and none even for the halt and the maimed, there can be none for the men who have started the conflict and whose leadership keeps it going. In other words a Prime Minister must be as fearless physically as he is bold morally or he will lose contact with his people, and we may even be approaching the stage at which statesmen and generals will stand side by side on the battlefield. Although it is not likely that our military and our political leaders will ever again see Caesars, Cromwells, Napoleons and Washingtons returning to the scene-the Commissars of Russia, and in some degree our own War Ministers now in Egypt and the Far East, remind us that war means fighting with moral as well as with material weapons, and no escape for anyone. But whatever the truth there may be, it is no longer possible to say or feel-if that. ever was the full story-that statesmen make wars and soldiers fight them. Just as itis beginning to be as dangerous again to be a general as to be a private soldier, so the statesman who leads his country into a war is almost as likely as its humblest citizen to be himself among the casualties. And the citizen is in danger only when the war comes to him; the statesman, if he lives on the outer fringes of the conflict, goes, and must go, to meet it.