READJUSTMENT

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 14 May 1945, Page 4

READJUSTMENT

SO strongly entrenched is habit in the lives of us all that it is hard to realise the European war is really over. Almost instinctively we look, or listen for news of the progress of great battles which are no more in this theatre of a world war. How much stranger the new situation must be to the fighting men on land, on sea and in the air and, most of all, to the millions of distressed peoples who have come through untold tribulations into the sunshine of peace. The power of feeling has almost been beaten out of some of them but, throughout occupied Europe, relief from the utter darkness of despair ' must still appear as a blessing too good to be true. Time for readjustment is required before we can realise just what has been won in Europe and before the full significance of the momentous events we have lived through can be fully appreciated. In no other period of man’s history has there been an epoch of uglier menaces, more scientifically-devised torture and more abject misery inflicted on the generality of the people. Deliverance therefore brings a correspondingly deeper and more universal response in thanksgiving. Our British nation has passed through many dangers and difficulties. The Norman Conquest, the threat of Spain, the bid of Louis XIV, and long and fierce struggle for supremacy against Nao- were all crises fraught with ti _• direst peril for the people of those days. Because of the prominence these threats from aggressors deservedly receive in the history books we are apt to think they surpass in magnitude the two world wars of the twentieth century. In the* whole field of human conflict nothing can compare with what we have experienced in the nineteen forties. After withstanding such shocks it takes time for man’s mentality to regain its equilibrium.