Waiting

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 256, 19 May 1944, Page 5

Waiting

OPE deferred makes the heart sick. Expectations that do not mature sooner or later seem unreal. It is impossible to focus attention on a given object and hold it there indefinitely. To repeat the same words, the same thoughts, or even the same movements, over and over again is to go to sleep. Therefore it would be an exaggeration to | say that the whole world, or even our small part of it, is getting more and more worked up as the invasion of Europe draws nearer. Those who have been worked up have calmed down again. Those who have been hot have cooled off. Those who have raged at delays rage no longer. Those who have under-estimated the difficul‘ties begin to understand. Those who have been blind begin to see. But nobody doubts any longer. Everybody sees now — no one better than the Nazis — that the circles are narrowing, the bomb explosions taking a pattern, the clouds massing in definite directions. Any day, any hour, this day perhaps as we write these lines, the assault will begin, and waiting will become watching. Then things will happen that the world has never seen before. It has seen comparable artillery barrages. It has seen worse destruction over limited areas. It has seen hills blown away by = subterranean mining. But it has not seen, and if it is capable of learning, it will never see again, so much destruction in so many places at the same time, sos many of the signs of civilisation being blotted out in a moment or two, such violence above the earth as well as on it, so many earthquakes or so many fires. It is for that we are waiting, and for the speedy end of it, but those people are also right who say that it has already begun. The "softening up" process has certainly begun, and the significance of that phrase will begin to break through if the picture on our cover is multiplied by ten thousand.