NEW WAY OF LIFE

Nelson Evening Mail, 21 July 1916, Page 2

NEW WAY OF LIFE

WHEN TEE MEN COME BACK. INFLUENCE OF ARMY TRAINING. "There is only one tiling that can and v, ill save the ''British nation and tench ii -a new way of life—it is the British Army." Thus writts Professor J. H. Morgan, in Luid and Water, ou the possible efforts of army training on millions of British civilians. "Of one thing we can be quite sure," he continues. "The men who have been through this great freemasonry of arms wilL be very_ impatient of the old appeals to class-prejudice which have so long disfigured our politics. After the 'realitiies of 'war, the sham-ifights of politics will wear a singularly inept vesture, and in nothing will they appear so inept as in their attachment to words and phrases. It may be. also, that they will be far less conscious of rights and far more alive to duties. They will bring a highly critical mind to bear upon these things. The clerk pr the artisan who has been an n.c.o. or a subalte.rn, and the employer or professional man—there are many such—who has served as a private in the ranks, will have learnt, the one to rule, and other to obey, and each will have discovered the peculiar secret of all armies : that he who aspires to give commands must have learnt first how to execute them. Of all the lessons that the Army can teach that is the most enduring and the most valuable, and the one which the "average Englishman—especially the Englishman who has not been to a public school —needs most to learn. Another is the habit of turning your hand to anything without enquiring too closely ■whether it is the job you contracted to do or whether you are g£tting the pay you bargained for. NO "OVERTTME" IN THE TRENCHES. "The first thing a man in the Army finds—particularly the infantryman—is that his pay bears no appreciable relation to his work, that he may be called' upon at any moment to do another man's ( job. that there's no such thing as piecework rates and 'overtime,' and that it's a mere chance whether he can count on no .more than four days in the trenches, four in support, and no less than ten in | billets after lie has rung the changes on the one and the other.

"These men are going through a great school of patriotism, and it would be affectation to deny that nine out of ten Englishmen badly needed it." - [Professor Morgan speaks of "that evangelist of a new gospel—the man home on leave," and says :

"The people at home have still much to learn; they have yet to learn that the nation's extremity is not the spendthrift's and the shirker's opportunity." In Prance he saw "much thrift, rio frivolity, affd little pleasure, an immense, almost" religious, concentration of purpose, and everyone living on the very margin of subsistence. "When I returned to England I saw — T need not say what I saw; everyone has seen it. What is going to save us?"