Army Leadership

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 159, 10 July 1942, Page 3

Army Leadership

announced a new method of selecting army officers on the day on which a devastating attack on the old method arrived by post in a book* It was what we might call a strange coincidence. But it was a stranger coincidence that cable and book were both funny. The cable was funny because it included psycho-analysis and tight rope walking among army tests of leadership. The book was funny because it told what an irreverent Australian saw, thought, and endured in a British regiment between July, 1940, and January, 1942. Of course the fun in both cases was incidental. It is profoundly important that the army should find better officers, and if psychiatry and obstacle races will help to find them their use in such a place is no more ludicrous than shorts must have seemed the first day they appeared on the parade ground. So with the Australian’s book. It is uproarious reading because learning to be a soldier can be an uproarious experience. But it is very important reading whether it makes us laugh or cry. It is an attempt to laugh the army out of its gravest weaknesses — emphasis on the wrong facts, cultivation of the least useful techniques. It is therefore deliberately and more than deliberately provocative. It rings all the changes between simple exaggeration and hilarious clowning. But even the final satirical sentence, "We will win the war if we are not careful", is simply the author’s method of blowing the trumpet, banging the drum, and arousing us to " a vision, aiming high, of the new England, new Europe, new world" our army, navy, and air force are trying to make. . CABLE message last week

*Bless ’Em All. Written from inside knowpe by "Boomerang." Secker and Warburg, on.