THE WHITE-FEATHER MEN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16098, 11 December 1915, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE WHITE-FEATHER MEN.

BY EX/STB K. MORTON". | I

Who are they*they are th« men who could fight for their country and •won't; j the growing problem of Great Britain, of j Xew Zealand, of all the Overseas ' Dominions where loyal service is a free- ! will offering, and it is left to men's indi- j vidual consciences whether they find their , souls in the testing of $-he trenches or lose i | them in the slough of blind selfishness, : I cowardice and dishonour. All selfishness I is a form of moral blindness, for it blinds , its victims to the enduring truth that or!y j as we are willing to sacrifice are we worthy • to possess, and s<">oner or later, as the , ! Three Sisters see fit, we reap of our sow- ; | ing, and garner in the harvest of the , j years; perhaps before the thread is c - :t, ' I perhaps after, but assuredly seme time, ■ j f >r no man ever yet has lived who was ■ i greater than eternal truth. ! j But the whit< -feather men don't bother ; their heads over abstract trifles like truth , j or patriotism or honour, any more than I thev do with thought of just what answer i | they will give later on. when in the per- , j spective of the years, other eyes will see i i clearly much that is n'jw clouded and , j obscure, and other tongues will ask questions which even the white-feather man j m.iv perchance find difficulty in answering. Many of this great company of the able- j bodied, flabby minded, who somehow still j hold up their heads and venture out be- i fore dark, have already received the visible insignia of their apostasy, the white | feather, emblem of the chicken-hearted, j : but war is no matter of feathers, black, i white, or green, and if a man's own heart , I dues not impel him to fall in with the ] | Great Brotherhood, a whole flock of birds ' plucked over his head would not induce ! him to change his course ! Few methods ot recruiting are more futile or out-of place than this business of scattering white j plumage broadcast, for so much of it j i flutters down on the wrong people that ] the whole thing merely becomes a mockery j I and a nuisance. There are other far more ■ effective ways of reaching the man who j is wearing the brand of the coward in his ! heart, and when the Powers that Be have done with the shilly-shallying, halfhearted coaxing and entreating that is fast draining the nation of its best, and leaving only the coward and the wastrel to increase and multiply, all will be swept into the threshing-mill of compulsion, and the chaff be winnowed from the grain. No one, even in the present crisis, would be so foolish as indiscriminately to class all who have not gone to the war with the bona-fide wearer of the white feather. There are many men who unquestionably must remain. There are lads in Auckland, scores of them, breaking their young hearts to follow the reddened .footsteps of their brothers slain in battle, for always, among the best, yon will find i that where one has been taken the mantle of his deathless spirit descends and urges his brother forward to fill his. place and take up the work laid down. But who would send the hali-erown boy straight from a sheltered home to the welter of the battlefield, to privations and hardships that search the emduranoe of strongest manhood ? War is work for men, not for untried lads, no matter how far their zeal and

laus, no maTi-er now jar iiitrir z-trai aim { enthusiasm urge them forward. It i°? not. ! the boys "who are hanging hack—when did i youth ever think of danger or suffering l or loss when adventure lured them on ?— ' hut, to their shame be it said, the men. I Even now, after 15 months of war, in I come homes may you see the depressing j spectacle of three or four stalwart young j men, sound in wind, limb, everything but ! sou] and spirit, sitting round their father's I table three times a day, impiously un--1 afraid even of choking, as they eat their fill and read in the paper the while of the privations of the men in the trenches. And in the house next door, there sits alone a sorrowing, widowed mother, who has given her all, and now on the altar of the God of Battles is laying the ashes of her heart. . . . And that's the way it goes, with our volunteer army. The white-feathered men, however, are by no means idle these days, even though tiev may not be handling bayonet or rifle. Some of them, on the contrary, are eitremelv busy, probably busier than thev've been for a long time. They are getting married, some of them, and that alone takes quite a little thought and effort these days, when so many New Zealand girls are thinking more of men as soldiers than as lovers or husbands! Then there are others working industriously on the principle of hay-making in sunshine, for with so many fellowworkers and rivals now safely in khaki, things are looking up for those who stand and wait! Others, again, will tell you frankly they are waiting for conscription, and meantime their brothers and sisters are dying in a foreign land. One wonders sometimes, if the thought of what women have done and are doing, ever strikes a saving spark of shame from the benighted hearts of the men who deliberately elect to stay behind, those New Zealand nurses who went down to death in the Marquette, Nurse Cavell murdered in cold blood, the women working heroically through the stifling blaze of a tropical summer, stemming the mighty stream of sick and wounded which has surged across to Egypt's shores in the last seven months. "The work here is very hard, and the climate desperate," writes an Auckland girl from an Egyptian hospital, " but I have always been more thankful j than I can say that I came. . . . The men come in" literally in hundreds, such j pitiful wrecks, and the heart-breaking part is, that as soon as we have nursed them back to something like health, they go back to it all again.' Think of it, you I who haven't really thought much about jit at all, thousands of men in our ! Dominion refusing to lift a finger to serve I their country, and those poor, patched wrecks of men going back to the mockery I of Christmas in the trenches! Evidence is not wanting nowadays of a j growing bitterness toward the white- ! feather men on the part of our own sol- | diers who have returned sick or wounded i from the front. The first glamour of the ; homecoming has worn off; they are begin-' ning to look round and take the measure of the men whose burden they have been j i bearing. A soldier whose hand still falls 1 j helplessly to his side now and then when i he uses it overmuch, spoke these words ! the other day: Yes, I'm going back; I off to Trentham to-imorrow. Want to go? Well, when I first came back. I thought of nothing else, but I've been home four months now. and when I sec : all these chaps who've never done a hand's ! turn or missed a drink or a meal i the whole time we've been fighting, i and then think we chaps have to go I back to it all again and leave them to I their good —well, things' seem 'pretty badly fixed, somehow. It's not the I going back I mind. It's leaving all that I crowd to sit at home at our expense He wasn't a coward, that man; his name ; was among the first enrolled in the exj peditionary force; he had given a year : of his life, had fought and suffered "and I seen dear comrades die beside him, and ! then, with memory of these things scored 1 deep in his heart, he had come home and j seen things for himself, seen just how the ■ home folk were taking the war. j The returned soldier has a good many things against the white-feather man but ! deepest of all is his contempt for the' man j who, in his haste to secure a certain meaj sure of exemption from service for his country, gets married. The fact that he marries proves, or should prove, hi? physical fitness; that he is taking unto himself a *-ife shows that there were no previously-existing heavy responsibilities. And the queerest part of the whole queer business is that girls should be found | willing to smooth the path for such. Still. j that's how things stand : meantime, the I feather men are picking the winners I for the Christmas races, drinking to Ger- . many's downfall, and cheering lustily as their brothers march bv on their way to ' war.