Legation Days

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 453, 27 February 1948, Page 5

Legation Days

HE interview in this issue Sir Carl Berendsen will surprise those readers who think that a diplomat is a man who dresses and dines well and occasionally gets involved in sticky negotiations. Even when allowance is made for Sir Carl’s fanatical energy, the picture that remains is exhausting even to look at. And it is unfortunately not just a picture. It is a record of things done or to be done by men and women whose need of rest and desire for relaxation is as real as our own. It does not just happen somehow that when a man enters on a job of that -kind all his human attributes and flesh and blood limitations suddenly leave him. They assert themselves as strongly as ever, often more strongly, since he is under constant, urgent, wholly justifiable, and often strictly necessary temptations to desert his desk for the dining table. It is all very exhausting, and in the end liable to confuse and irritate any man whose mind and body are not both resilient and tough. -The man who sighs for such a life, or rather whose baser half sighs for it, should, if the cost to the rest of us were not so heavy, be condemned to it for five years without hope of escape. Sir Carl Berendsen happens to be one of the few men New Zealand has so far produced who are equal to the strain physically as well as mentally, and it is clear that even he at present sighs for nothing so much as a hut in the wilderness where no one can find him for a month or two. He may or may not discover it. Everyone with bowels of compassion must hope that he will, But duty or conscience will drag him back, far sooner than he wishes or can afford to come, and a plane will rush fim back to Washington to be envied by those who don’t know the price he is paying to serve his country. Pity is perhaps the wrong word to offer him, or even sympathy; but he does at least deserve understanding, and that is something with which most of us are not very generous.