We Can Win

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 143, 20 March 1942, Page 4

We Can Win

! HE most important sentence in the Prime Minister’s recent address to the nation contained eight letters only: We can win. Three short syllables, that a child could have uttered. But the greatest orator in the world could not have said anything that is more important to remember. We can win. Victory is possible. We need not be beaten unless we choose to be. Our future is in our own hands. A child could say it. A half-wit could understand it. But who can bring it to pass? How do we convert "we can win" into "we shall win"? The answer is as simple as the question. We remember who we are. We remember who our enemies are. We face the facts-Japan’s devilish thoroughness, our own disgraceful carelessness. We remember our mothers and our sisters and our wives; our sons languishing in prison camps; the years we have spent working out a way of life worthy of our race and of our religion. We remember the sixteen thousand New Zealanders who died for us twenty-five years ago. We remember the social and economic costs of that struggle, the stresses and strains we had to meet and overcome, the difficulty with which we saved our liberty and our democracy from the fires of revolution afterward. We shall remember all those things, and remembering them feel both proud and humble. Then we shall take our guns. We shall lift up our heads and our hearts. We shall know, and we shall feel, that it is a sweet and beautiful thing to die for our country if die we must. But we shall not suppose that it is either sweet or beautiful to die stupidly. We shall not take our guns to the beaches if the enemy is on the headlands. We shall not wait for him on the highway if he is crawling through the bush. We shall not weigh ourselves down with heavy packs, or anchor our feet in. ponderous boots, if he is running light in shorts and shoes-as in Malaya and Java he did. We shall learn from our failures in Burma and Johore as he has learnt from his own failures in China. We shall fight the battle of New Zealand, not the battle of Britain or of France or of Libya or of Crete. But the time is short. We can win, and we shall, if we think quickly and act boldly. The worst enemy is panic. But the next is routine --doing what the enemy expects us to do, and being where he expects us to be. We shall win when we untie our minds,