"WENT THE DAY WELL?"

New Zealand Herald, Volume 80, Issue 24775, 24 December 1943, Page 2

"WENT THE DAY WELL?"

THE four short lines might have been the writing of a Greek of that brief generation -which set the Parthenon over Athens and produced the drama of Sophocles. They run, a tribute to the humble dead, thus, Went the day wellf We died and never knew. But well or ill. Freedom, we died for yon. The marble of great epitaphs is in them, the reserve behind which valour hides emotion. In such spirit they Tvrote of three hundred Spartans who dj?d to hold Thermopylae when European civilisation, scarce born, first met the threat of swarming hosts from Asia. "Tell Sparta," ran the two lines of rerse, "that we lie here obedient to her behests." That much and nothing more. " That was the way of the Greeks. Or the Spartans who died at Plataea in the 1918 of that ancient struggle, Simonides wrote, Into the dark death-cloud thev passed to set Fame 011 their dear land for fadeless wreath, And dying, died not. Valour lifts them yet Into the splendour from the nieht beneath. And here, as far as a distant and an alien tongue can render its polished austerity, is the same poet's word for the Athenians who fell on that same battlefield. If the best merit is to lose life well, To us bevond all else that fortune came. In war to stive Greece liberty we fell Heirs of all time's Imperishable lame. A Common Grave Under the words, as under the great mound at Marathon, great and small lie in one grave. There were common men who might have lived long years and filled their undistinguished span with labour on vine and olive in the green valleys under the stripped brown hills. Some who "lost life well" might have lived to put immortal words into books. Like Rupert Brooke, twenty-foui centuries later on an Aegean island not two hundred miles away, they died in the press of spears, and "never knew" what else life held.

Xor how the battle went! The valiant little States who faced the might of Persia when the great Shah rolled west, his multitude drinking the very rivers dry, and filling the sea with ships, knew that liberty and their way of life hung on the issue of a year. They did not know that they were shaping the long centuries, and that

By PADRE

all history was waiting the turn of battle in the narrow seaways and the dusty plains. How easily might all have hung in the close contested fray on the cool courage or the angry spear-play of one unknown man, cursing the heat and flies and longing only for the cool spring and the plane tree behind his cottage! Such is their fate and privilege who stand at the crossroads of the human story. As Masefielcl has it, it is not "the bemedalled commander beloved of the throne" who shapes the course of history;, but much more "the lads who earned the koppie and cannot be known." The grave of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey and under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is a tribute to that thought and the pathos of their fate who "never knew" whether the flood passed over them or whether victory was won. There were men from the ends of the earth who saw their last sun as the undamaged midit of Hitler's army flooded across a Greek river-bed. They never knew how the fantastic battle of Crete saved Syria, never knew that while they fought and fell the roaring factories of Russia were pouring out the guns which curtained Moscow, saved Stalingrad, and left two German armies in the snow. "They Never Knew" They never knew, those whose last hour saw the swarm of Rommel's tanks cross the ploughed desert at Sidi Eezegh, that someone had saved the Nile. The last stand of a handful of exhausted men, the last coin of the last tax they imposed upon the foe may have saved the minutes which turned the tide. As it flowed back from Alamein to the Adriatic they never knew. Nor did the many whose tales will never be told. The war ended for them with the roar of an explosion and the wild rush of water, deeper, colder as they rushed for the engineroom ladder, or over the Ruhr in spinning darkness and a struggle with jammed doors. Someone has convoyed the cargo which turned the scale: One decisive bombload will thrust German industry beyond repair. So wars are won. Common men and humble sacrifice buy victory. And if, as someone puts it, this is to be the century of the common man, that is nothing more than justice. Round the long battlefronts the conflict is no sport of kings. Common men will decide the issue of liberty or slavery.

Those who live to see how goes the day must guard with jealousy the simple aspirations of the dead, ff they died for liberty their kin must hold it fast.