SOLDIER TO CIVILIAN

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 103, 29 October 1945, Page 6

SOLDIER TO CIVILIAN

It is harder for a soldier—and this applies to members of all the Services —to return- to civilian life than it is to become a soldier from a civilian, as veterans of the last war well know. When these men see the warriors of this generation, returned from overseas, on the sidewalks of the city in ones and twos and small groups, still in uniform or in mufti for the first time for years—and doing it hard— they will sympathise, remembering their own plight and feelings some twenty-five or twenty-six years ago. They know the symptoms, for they have been through it themselves, and it is a long and trying ordeal of readjustment to a totally different kind of life from that to which they have been inured by hard campaigning with their comrades in far-off lands. It is the comradeship of those years of war, in fair weather and foul, good times and toad, that they miss. Some of it remains on the voyage home, but, when they arrive in the port of destination in the Dominion, they disband and disperse to try to pick up again the threads of civil life all over the two islands where they dropped them, perhaps, years ago. With that the comradeship ends, to be renewed only partially in the district branches of. the R.S.A., or when they come to town and meet old "cobbers." It is a wrench from which some men take long to recover, and some never do. That is one aspect. There are others. There is the irksomeness of civilian occupation, the seeming pettiness after the big organised- business of war, which makes life now seem stuffy and cramped after years in the open air with wide horizons. Home life and domestic detail may oppress, after the freedom of the march and tfe# jK>cieffcp of the camp and the cantecSL All lais makes tb*> of r^^bilitation

much more of a problem than the. mere finding of jobs and resettling the returned man in civil life.

In such circumstances the remarks of Dr. Walter Reeve, assistant medical superintendent at the Services Hpspital, Rotorua, in an address reported today, are wise and timely. He notes the difficulties of readjustment and asks the people generally in their contacts with returned servicemen, and employers particularly, to be patient and careful to avoid giving offence. As the doctor put, it: "A returned man does not look for sympathy. What he needs more than anything else is the understanding that he is not wilfully difficult over adjusting himself to civilian occupation again. You, as the employer, must bring to the task all the experience of life you have gained and all the tact and wisdom you have learned. . . . Your clear duty now is to help train them to become civilian workers again and accept the fact that the change in these men is inevitable and not their .fault." Towards those who have suffered physically, as well as mentally, the impact of war, the sick in health and the maimed, those who will never be the same again, the same qualities, to an .even greater degree, are demanded of the public in foieir attitude —patience and tact and infinite good will—to the men who have made the greater sacrifice for the safety and security of their fellowcountrymen. .. . |

It is an old problem, old as war itself, this return of the warrior home from the war. In the past his lot has often been tragic indeed. The Napoleonic 'War left all Europe, and not least Britain, full of old soldiers, with beggarly pensions, or none at all, seeking alms in the streets, tramping the roads, their past deeds forgotten, their present needs unalleviated. This lasted through the last century and was immortalised by Kipling in his "Tommy Atkins." Even after the South African War there was the same scandal of the "old soldier." It was not so bad after the last war. Much was done for the returned man in every country of the Empire, but many mistakes were made, and, one hopes, many valuable lessons learned. It is not so much money or land that the serviceman wants; it is a friendly understanding of his real needs, spiritual as well as physical. Dr. Reeve's remarks at^ Rotorua will be a good guide towards the right attitude and conduct. For the rest, time, the great healer, must be left to do its beneficent work in restoring the much-battered, much-enduring men who saw us through six years of war, with all its vicissitudes, to the normal ways of peace.