APPEAL TO WOMEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 215, 6 August 1943, Page 3

APPEAL TO WOMEN

Sir,-Like many old soldiers, "Audacious XX" appears to be rather more sentimental than realistic. Anyway, he ignores the fact that I went out of my way to admit that even in wartime the great majority of people do not behave promiscuously. Similarly, "Per Ardua ad Astra" construes my letter as a specific attack on the Air Force, whereas, of course, it was nothing of the sort. I stressed that I had no desire to pick on any one section as against another, and only mentioned "a young Air Force man" by way of example. I might as easily, and with equal impartiality, have mentioned the US. Marines, whose esprit de corps includes a tradition that in almost any engagement they must expect a staggering proportion of casualties. Surely such an attitude of mind has some bearing on the subject under discussion. But in case anybody gets me wrong again, lét me fepeat that my argument applies as much to civilians, men and women, as to fighting men. Another correspondent, "Sappho," came much nearer the heart of the problem when she pointed out that war and promiscuity are complementary evils. The press, the pulpit, and the politicians cannot go on urging us to do the things that total war makes necessary without inevitably taking the fine edge off the moral sense of many people. When any Government, because of the demands of total war, jettisons its normal standards of civilised conduct to the extent of admitting that not a single enemy survivor of a sea battle this year was allowed to escape machine-gunning by ‘planes or "mopping up" by sharks, and when the general public (including the Churches), accept this sort of thing with complacency and even approval-when this happens, it is surely not surprising, though no less deplorable, that other standards of decency should be going overboard as well. A Church which condones war cannot logically expect to make much impression when it condemns

adultery.-

AUDAX II

(Wellington),

(This correspondence is now closed.-Ed.).