NEVER AGAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 103, 3 May 1945, Page 5

NEVER AGAIN

MILITARY LAXITY

TRAINING TO PREVENT WAR

I "We say glibly that the. British Empire has fought for freedom, but is it not true to say that we have fought for a way of living, and are not those people who have fought entitled to some say in that way of living? What, i for. instance, is going to be our attitude to military training? Are we going to encourage our sons and daughters to do their full share of training, or are we going to sit back and see the laxity creep in that came all too soon after I the last war?"

These. questions were raised by Mr. J. T. Burrows, rector of the Waitaki Boys' High School, in a stirring address at Oamaru, in which he made a strong plea, as a returned serviceman, for post-war training as a means of preventing war. Mr. Burrows rose to the rank of brigadier on service in the Middle East in this war, and he is also well known as a New Zealand representative footballer.

"If we are in doubt," he said, "I think we should read again the accounts of the German concentration camps and the treatment of the internees which has shocked the whole world. We have seen what war means. We have seen death' and destruction. We know what it means to be really frightened, really dirty, really thirsty, and really tired. We know what it means to be constantly under fire for I days on end, with flies and filth and death in our nostrils. We've seen the war of terror carried against civilians homeless and starving; we've seen our friends killed and maimed. We have reason to hate war. We have earned the right to say that our sons shall not, |if we can' prevent it, see the things :that we have seen and suffer the things that we have suffered. i "How can we prevent it?" he asked. Like many others he believed that to prevent war they must be ready for ( it. This war had taught him that I civilisation was truly only skin deep. "To prevent war," he said, "we must be trained for it, and our British nation must never again become militarily decadent as we were in 1939."

In England and America returned men of all the Services were already advocating a sterner and more effective form of military training than had ever been known here. They were advocating at least a year's compulsory training for young men. They claimed that tliis would pay a dividend in more ways than one —a dividend of health through physical training, 'through regular meals and hours, and proper medical and dental attention; a dividend of military efficiency greater thna was possible under the old system; A dividend of training in cleanliness and neatness- and unselfishness and citizenship through community life and discipline whether imposed by high authority or by the men themselves. "Now," said Mr. Burrows, "we may or may not agree with that. Some will say that our old Territorial system, if given the right support and' co-opera-tion, will prove adequate. Whatever we feel about the system, to be adopted we know it is right to encourage the younger, generation to be properly trained. We know they will get something from community life in the Army which nothing else can give. Above all, we know that they must learn that the harder a man works for his country, the more he gives to it, the greater his love for it will be. "We may not be able to take any active part in military training in the future, but," he added, "let us at least do all we can to encourage it and where possible give it active support."