War Story

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 371, 2 August 1946, Page 5

War Story

us the other day that the time for talking is when we have taken off our harness, not when we are girding it on. But that of course means that when the time to talk comes the struggle is no longer actively in our minds. We have not forgotten it; we shall never forget it; but we are not as receptive to the record of it in print as we might have been before it ended. But that stage passes too. The day comes when we want to look back, and feel betrayed if the sign-posts are not there. We want the facts, the figures, the dates, the events overseas, the over-all picture at home, and it was for that day, primarily, that War Record, an illustrated booklet of 62 pages, went last week into every New Zealand home. There is not much in it that we do not know now or could not, with a little difficulty, discover -though there are tables and comparisons that will surprise some of us when we begin to think what they mean. But to far more than half of us the facts in a year or two will be blurred and indistinct if we cannot at intervals pass them under review. They will still be in newspaper files and libraries and sooner or later will go on record in the war histories. In other words they will never be lost to students. But not many of us are students. Not many of us keep newspaper clippings, buy histories, or regularly use libraries. We are too busy, tog tired, too ignorant, too untrained, too impatient, or too poor. We live in events as they happen, and when we blunder on events that depend on other events, on to-morrows that mean nothing without yesterdays, we fumble and lose our way. War Record is a defence against that. It is not the full story of the last six years, or half of it, or even a complete summary of it. But it is a better summary than 99 per cent. of us could or would have made for ourselves, ind now we all possess it. Prime Minister reminded