THEY COME BACK OLDER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 300, 23 March 1945, Page 7

THEY COME BACK OLDER

(Written for "The Listener’ by

JAMES

HARRIS

N the faces of people waiting for hospital-ships, and especially in the faces of those older people who are living through their second war, the mingling of intense emotions of hope and fear is unmistakable. The hope is that the loved one will really be aboard. The fear is that the injuries that have sent him or her back home may be very bad. Even for a bystander, not personally concerned, but just watching’ these people, the families meeting their sick and injured sons and daughters, the suspense is bad, and when the expected one does appear, it isnot the clear physical injuries that are hardest to bear. Thus there was a son, a soldier, who came down the gangway staring straight before him, and humping his kitbag straight towards his parents who were calling out to him. Turning to follow the other soldiers into the clearing station, he passed within a yard of those parents of his without showing the least glimmer of recognition for them. By contrast, another mother was lucky. She, too, was waiting for a son whose injuries she did not know, and she stood watching .the stream of unknown people coming down that gangway. There were men on stretchers, men with arms in slings, Waacs recovered from illness, a blinded Maori with dark glasses, and men without visible injury. Then suddenly the mother’s attention stiffens, her son is there. He has the thinned but cheerful face of the successful convalescent. Crutches are under his two arms, and down between the crutches there is only one leg, the left trouser of the battledress being rolled up to the thigh. He comes down easily enough, used to the crutches, and the mother runs forward. Together they come back, he smiling more broadly than ever, and she with tears, and developing so strong a sympathetic limp in the left leg that she can scarcely walk. The sympathy spread further than to the mother, and it was hard for a stranger not to run forward and ety, "How can I help, is there anything I can do?" There was great beauty in that meeting, a’ tragic beauty certainly, but far less tragedy than in many of the meetings which fi place ‘that day. Further along the line of return to civil life there are injured men, injured by land-mines most of them, who are learning new trades because they have been incapacitated for their old ones, or learning a more ambitious trade than they had before the war. Those who need them, too, are learning to use their attificial limbs. Some ‘are achieving ambitions, ent just ae ar il ae e great ry Li ‘ them e : " Self-sup-ast a elp "Yoe' ‘friends: in temporary need, not help for the helpless. ye

It is the sort of help that speeds physical and mental recovery from the strains and injuries of war. * * * O good can come out of war except a determination to make a better job of the next peace. The medical research which has been stimulated by war could have been stimulated much more easily by financial grants in peacetime. But though the losses and the injuries are hard to bear, in one respect at least our war damage is nothing like as bad as some people once professed to fear. When the men first went away to the war that had to be fought, there were some who said that the price would be tremendous, not because of casualties, but because these men would come back so callous and so brutalised that there would be no end of murder and civil war when they returned. Even in those days, most of us knew well enough that this was false, since we were familiar with the characters of the veterans of World War One. But, nevertheless, the argument had an uneasy feeling of logic about it, and seemed to make sense. Originally, it may have come from missionary experience with the mercenaries of Chinese war lords, or else from an imagination driven by the belief that man is essentially wicked. Or, possibly, the origin of the idea is known only to Dr. Goebbels’ organisation. Wherever it came from, and although it did not square with last war experience, it made many people uneasy at the rt and may still need to be exorcised. The fact is that war does not carry over into civil life. A footballer running for a tram does not make flying tackles at rival aspirants for a seat, and, similarly, returned soldiers in a peaceful and hin agp tt community play the gate life. accordin to peaceful rules. Ao ; rar 5 Nite inyinumber of lives according to érent rules and keep thém separate. It is only when’ things get mixed that there is trouble. When there is war and starvation at home, as

in Greece, then anything may happen. Civil standards of conduct vanish. It is as though someone has started a game of football in the office, and everyone has joined in, including many who don’t even observe the rules of football. With us, returned men have a normal civil life to return to, in a country undamaged by war. They drop back into a way of life whose rules have not. been changed in their absence, and, being older, find themselves more able to deal with it. They usually marry and settle down, if not married already. * % * MEMORIES of that idea of the brutalising effect of war returned not» unpleasantly the other day. There was one returned man on his new farm, and another, his neighbour, visiting him. The war was still very much with them, the bees being described as "zooming up the hjli like when the boys are firing tracer." Then the subject of killing came up. "There’s just one thing you could do to help me," the caller was told. "You could kill those six chickens for me. L can’t bear to do it myself." "I’m sorry," he said, "but I couldn't do it either, not since El Adem,". * * e HE men who have come batk from the’ war in the. Middle East and from the war in the Islands have not changed, because for them the war has not been a part of real life. The worst of it was a bad dream which the sight of blood again will revive too vividly. When, they come back they are not changed men, except that the office boy may come back a captain, They come back older, and come back stronger characters, that is all. Quite a lot older, but not too old to learn new trades and build themselves new lives. When there seems..to be change, it is most likely to be in the observer who has been at home through these years, living a normal life in-which all experiences have been a part of real life, and * therefore niuch more significant than the fantastic gs eoraerey of war. we,