Telling The Soldiers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 120, 10 October 1941, Page 4

Telling The Soldiers

T is reported from London that the War ] Office is about to establish a branch called the A.B.C.A. (Army Bureau of Current Affairs) and that this branch will organise lectures and discussions among soldiers on the meaning and aims of the war. It is even suggested by the New Statesman that this form of education will be compulsory, and that time spent at a lecture will be time "on parade." Some such plan has often been recommended during the last two years, and to find out what demand for it exists among soldiers themselves Mr. J. B. Priestley spent some days recently with one of the Commands interviewing both officers and men. But it is a sensation, if it is true, that the plan has now been officially adopted by the Army and that the details are now being worked out by Sir Ronald Adam (AdjutantGeneral) and General Harry Willans (Director of Army Welfare). It is a sensation because the War Office moves like the mills of God, slowly and often . mysteriously, but the sensation ought to be the fact that we have been able for so long a time to fight blindly. It is tedious to keep on repeating that we are fighting a total war, in which one half of civilisation is trying to destroy the other half; but we are; and we are not only calling on our soldiers to remember that what is at stake is far more than the winning or losing of battles--we expect them to believe us when we say such things, and to know why they are true. And that is far more than a reasonable strain on the common soldier’s loyalty and credulity. Soldiers have always been told that their cause is good, and a number sufficient to keep the whole mass fighting have usually believed that it is good. But soldiers have not before been assembled in such numbers as there are on the world’s battlefields to-day, and armies have never before been exposed to so many mentally disturbing influences. Since the last world war was fought the weapons of propaganda have been multiplied at such a furious rate that some of the battles in this war were lost before they were begun. The Army Bureau of Current Affairs is therefore a necessary, and very much overdue, attempt to create armies that in Crom- well’s words "know what they fight for, and love what they know." It is not only a camp answer to Dr. Goebbels, but the answer of faith to fanaticism,