Home Again

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 213, 23 July 1943, Page 3

Home Again

N thousands of New Zealand homes this week there is a chair filled that has been vacant for more than three years; filled unexpectedly. Nothing quite the same has ever happened to us before, because the war is not yet over, and when soldiers return at the end of a war they have been expected weeks in advance. On this occasion they have arrived, not indeed unannounced, but with | so little warning that the excitement of the announcement had not died down before they walked in. It would be difficult to exaggerate what it all mounts up to in happiness and relief from strain. For it is not only the men themselves who -have been given this period of rest. Relief for them means relief while their furlough lasts for all their relatives and friends, especially their mothers and sisters and wives, and those children who are old enough to suffer the pain of war without being old enough to help themselves by taking part in it. But the return means more than that to those whose duty it has been to work and wait at home. It is a kind of inspection on a grand scale of civilian activities and morale. While the men themselves have no such thought or purpose, the mere fact that they have walked in on us compels us to ask ourselves what we have been doing in their absence. We may not feel our shortcomings as acutely as the contributor who describes on another page how he reacted when he found himself on the transport; but we are dangerously complacent or dull if we feel no challenge at all. But in the meantime the great fact is that so many of them are home, and so large a proportion of them well and cheerful and confident. And it is a different kind of confidence from the faith they had when they went away. Their confidence then was largely derived. They believed in their cause, and had faith that somewhere and somehow the light would break through the clouds. Now they have seen it break, and have passed from faith to knowledge.