A Debt Unpaid

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVI, Issue 11, 24 December 1925, Page 5

A Debt Unpaid

We to Face Peace

AS THEY FACED WAR. PHILIP GIBBS’S MESSAGE. Let us be honest with ourselves on this seventh day of Armistice, said Sir Philip Gibbs in the London “Chronicle.” Don’t let us pretend to emotions which make no stir in our hearts. Have we any emotion left—seven years after the silence of the guns—beyond a vague sadness, a two minutes’ stupor, and again a quick sigh before forgetfulness again? Seven years is a long time in the short span of life. They say the human body renews all its cells in that time. Anyhow, we are not the same men and women who rejoiced, or wept, oil the first day of Armistice. The worldNias altered around us. and we have altered with its changed conditions. We are older. Some of us have lost faith a little, or altogether, in the over-strained hopes that were promised bv Peace. Weren’t we all going to be vei’y good, and idealistic, and helpful to one another when the slaughter had ceased and the wounds had healocl? We were going to carry on in the spirit of the men who died, with their courage, their loyalties, their generous service; only the object would be world-peace instead of world-war, and a better chance for the younger crowd. We would pav back to those who had saved us all, unstintingly. Wasnt’s that the idea on the first day of Armistice ?

LET US TELL THE TRUTH.

Let us tell the truth to ourselves. The sacred emotion of that first day of Armistice can hardly be renewed. We have fallen from our own ideals. We have not lived up to our promises. There should be a little secret shame in our hearts during that two minutes silence because we have gone back so quickly to the petty strife ol peace, our selfish interests, our narrow vision of life’s purpose. We have not yet paid back to the Mead, nor to some of the living who are still looking lor a The younger crowd has not caught any flame of inspiriration from the spiritual sacrifice ol those who fell, it was too much to hope for, and 1, lor one, don’t blame them. They were boys and girls when the war ended or* began. Children—too young to realise its vast tragedy, or even the courage needed by their lathers or elder brothers to live behind a sandbag parapet, to follow a creeping barrage, to crawl through poison gas, to hear the enemies’ “heavies” searching for their bodies in the mud. These young people of to-day are out lor life, not morbid memories. They don’t want to hear about the war. It was all very disgusting and exceedingly stupid. Forget it! Get on anyhow with the game of life, with as much fun as possible in an over-taxed world. To the younger crowd . that two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day comes with no sense of escape from monstrous hoj’rors, with no terrific thrill of pity for an agonised world, with no spiritual message for the future. It is our fault, not theirs. We have handed them no torch, because of our own lack of purpose, and our own forgetfulness.

BEGINNING TO FORGET. The very men who went through it all are beginning to forget. They remember only the comedy of the wax days, and hardly ever the tragedy. They remember " the comradeship, the adventure, the laughter, not the blood and agony. “It wasn’t a bad war, after all. in many ways. Better than the boredom of peace, with its nagging worries and lack of purpose!” One hears them say so, now that seven years have passed. The old discipline, the old loyalties, the common aim, have broken up into the fretfulness of peace-days, touched by bitterness and hate.

This gradual dwindling of emotion is natural enough, and, in its way, good. I agree with youth in saying. “Get on with life,” and in refusing to dwell too long with dark remembrance. But it is up to us older folk, who went through the war and saw the glory of the youth that was there, to make a renewal of that vow we made to them in our hearts when peace came at last, and we stood as it were between the past and the future, looking back to those years of massacre with a kind of stupefaction because of all its human loss—those comrades! — and forward,to a new strange world of peace which, surely to God. would be made somehow better because of frightful lessons.

PAYING OUR DEBT.

All of us then, I think, made some secret pledge of paying back to those fellows who went down in the mud—paying back by fellowship, and peacemaking, and charity, and remembrance of courage. Not by stone memorials shall we pay the debt, nor by civil strife within the nation, nor bv a cold shoulder to ex-Service men wearing their boots and their hearts out in search of work. Wq can only pay hack by making their service and sacrifice a living tradition, and handing it cu to the younger crowd in whom they may live again. “They gave their bodies to the Commonwealth” (it was written of the Greek heroes) “and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die; and with it the grandest of all tombs—not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the hearts of men. . . Their story is graven not only on stone, but lives far away without visible symbol, woven into’the stuff of other men’s lives.” On Armistice Day let the spirit of our dead youth find a home in our hearts, and be woven closer into the stuff of our own lives, so that we may face peace as they faced war—with valour and a sense of honour.