Lieutenant-General Freyberg

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 155, 12 June 1942, Page 4

Lieutenant-General Freyberg

HE promotion last week of General Freyberg perhaps reminded some of his admirers that he took the place of Captain Scott in the mind and imagination of J. M. Barrie. The story is told in the recent biography of Barrie written by Denis Mackail, and throws a great deal of light on the characters of the two central figures. Barrie when they first met was 56, Freyberg 26, and although both were shy men, and inhibited by modesty, the link between them held firmly till Barrie died at 77. It was of course difficult for Barrie to remain indifferent to heroes. He worshipped courage, moral and physical, as some men worship women and others worship gold, and there were many reasons why Freyberg should have been introduced to him ("fitly enough by Lady Scott") as the bravest man alive. His record, as every New Zealander now knows, was almost too dazzling at 26 to seem real. It was impossible that Barrie, who was taken to see him in hospital, should see him as an ordinary man, or think of him afterwards as just one more among thousands of the brave soldiers he had (by the end of 1916) already met. Even if he had been one of those Barrie, with his romantic attitude to heroes, would have been excited at that first meeting. But the truth, as closer acquaintance proved, is that Freyberg was a romantic figure — as simple as he was brave, as modest and kind as he was simple. Nor was he, Mackail points out, simple because he lacked intelligence. It would be vulgar flattery to call him an intellectual, and Mackail nowhere suggests anything like that. But he says thisand it is a test that would have satisfied even Carlyle: . He adjusted himself, with something more than ordinary intelligence, to flattery and fame. He remained entirely himself. The background altered, but nothing could touch his integrity. If that’s being simple, then simple is one of the right words. So there he is-commander of our division in the field, but the friend also, and on his own terms, of novelists, poets, playwrights, and utopian dreamers. No doubt, by this time, he is more an Englishman than a New Zealander, but if that is the case he has become a part of the England of which Barrie himself became a part, and in which it is harder to be base or mean than anywhere else in the world,