LIFE UNDER TENSION

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 72, 26 March 1941, Page 11

LIFE UNDER TENSION

In A. C. Benson's "House of Quiet" there is a passage which has a certain relevance to human conditions under the air warfare of today. He is noting "the perpetual instinctive consciousness of danger" from their enemies which besets certain birds in the open. They must live, he thinks, in a "tension of nervous watchfulness." "Do we realise," he goes on to ask, "what it must be to live, as even these sheltered birds do in a quiet garden, with the fear of attack and death hanging over them from morning to night?" Now that this has actually come to pass, however, it has turned out that Benson was quite wrong in his forecast of how we should behave in such circumstances. To be living, he says, under tension like that of the birds "would depress a human being into melancholia." Fortunately that is far from a correct description of the popular mind nowadays.

After being a member of the Ist Pioneer Training Battalion of the A.I.F. for ten months, Private W. P. K. Takarangi, Wanganui, has arrived in Auckland from Australia to join the Maori Battalion, states a Press Association message. He left New Zealand two years ago for the Scout jamboree and has since been working in various Australian States. He considers himself fortunate to be allowed to transfer to the New Zealand Forces.

Four Canadians in Britain have written to thank Hitler for "a wonderful rabbit dinner which took three 10001b bombs and one oil-bomb to kill."