Returned Soldiers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 315, 6 July 1945, Page 5

Returned Soldiers

D IRECTLY or indirectly an overwhelming proportion of the people of New Zealand have associations with returned soldiers. In any gathering of men over 20 and under 50 far more than half will have seen service of some kind; and every soldier has blood-relations, male and female, and intimate friends. What happens to one of them, therefore, happens to half-a-dozen, what, happens to all of them happens to the whole community. They are the community in the vicarious sense in which we are speaking. But the community is also the returned service-man. It has suffered with him, through him, for him; not always as deeply as he has, not always in the same way; but it has never been possible for him to march, fight, watch, wait, or endure alone. Every time the fires of war have scorched him a man or a woman or both have gone through agony at home. And now that he is himself home, or on the way, he does not feel himself'a man apart, or wish to be converted into one. He is a New Zealander back from a war that his father thought he would never have to fight; hoping as his father did that it will not have to be fought again; disillusioned in many ways, but feeling vaguely and seeing dimly that he has done his job in making the world a little safer and freer and cleaner. To ask him the moment he puts off his uniform to put on a moral mantle of statesmanship — answering ques‘tions to which he has hardly given three thoughts, correcting abuses that (he is to suppose) his father and mother and brothers and sisters have allowed to pile up in his absence, and even disposing of racial issues that have baffled the brains of three continents -is to ask him to make a patriotic fool of himself, whether the request comes from the Right or from the Left, or from the latent fascism lurking in every community and liable, even in New Zealand, to burst forth suddenly in the guise of loyalty and discipline.