Soldiers Into Civilians

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 231, 26 November 1943, Page 3

Soldiers Into Civilians

E print-to-day an interview with Lieutenant -Colonel Baker, D.S.O., Director of Rehabilitation. We print it because getting soldiers out of uniform. is almost as difficult as getting them into uniform, and has to be done without the emotional aids that carried them into camp. Though it is not true any longer that when a war has been won the men who won it are forgotten, it is true that

men go to war on a high wave of patriotism and return on a lower wave. Sometimes they return on a still dead sea, and while that has never been the case in New Zealand, it is as true here as anywhere else that returning is different from going away. It is something for which we all ought to prepare but for which most of us never do. We want to be. just, and generous too, but we either leave it to others to do our thinking for us or we rush impetuously into foolish sentimentalities. It is not necessarily a kindness to a returned soldier to undertake to get him a good job. It may be the greatest unkindness to help him into a business or on to a farm. With many soldiers the first task is to restore the habit of looking after themselves-a kind of weaning: process as Colonel

others the problem is going to be to cushion the "bump" they will feel when they drop out of commissioned rank on to an office stool or factory bench. The better they have done their job as fighting men the harder many are going to find it to return to mufti, and it is the task not only of the Rehabilitation Department, but of the public in general, to do what Colonel Baker calls "cancelling out that disadvantage." It is something that we must begin thinking about now before our armies return, and Colonel Baker’s remarks will help us to think-and if we have imagination, compel us.