"NEW ZEALAND WILL BE THERE"

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

"NEW ZEALAND WILL BE THERE"

NEW ZEALAND is more conspicuously on the map to-day than ever before in our brief century of history. We have our soldiers to thank chiefly for that. Mr. Churchill has called them a "ball of fire," a perfect figure to express intense concentration of terrific driving power. The 8.8.C. has gone out of its way to greet the arrival of New Zealanders in Italy with a special salute to the quality of our fighting men. Even the ranks of Tuscany can scarce forbear to cheer. The German wireless declared that Britain had been compelled to fall back on the New Zealanders to redeem the stalemate on the Italian front. There was the usual propaganda motif in that Teutonic chorus. Germany was more concerned to work in its old gibe at the ineffectiveness of Britain as a military power than to offer a sincere tribute to New Zealand.

But even so, at the back of it all is the plain fact that, to the German, New Zealand stands for a fighting power which, if it does not produce dread in our enemies, at least commands their respect. It has been publicity announced by several competent observers that tho

people of New Zealand have developed In recent years a habit of complacent self-assessment. We are becoming too sure of ourselves. Everything here including ourselves is instinctively overvalued. Probably there is some truth in the criticism. We are young and we are small. The young man and the small man are always prone to seek compensation in exaggeration of the importance to the universe of the qualities they do possess. And the same is likely to be true of nations as well as of men. But the faults of youth are all too soon outgrown, and surely youth is entitled to its long, long thoughts. And youth is not merely immaturity, ft has rights of its own, a status and a value as high in importance to the general well-being as the balanced judgments and solidities of age and experience. * It is a difficult business trapping a nation's spirit in a phrase. Nothing is easier than to affirm that the English or Scots or French or Germans are this, that, or the other thing. The next one you meet will probablv give the lie to all your theorising. Life is too complex in all its manifestations for facile generalising. Look at the German mentality as it has revealed itself to-day—its overweening vanity, its lust of power, its revolting sadism. Ixird Vansittart

roundly declares that all Germans are like that—that it is the inevitable result of German heredity and history and education. That question is a lone way from being decided yet, and it would always be wise to keep in mind the Yansittartian diagnosis. What is plain is that the Germans are one of the cleverest peoples the world has known, and they are without exception the stupidest race that has ever afflicted Europe. They are the most sentimental people in Europe, and they are the most savagely and coldly cruel. They have magnificent fighting quality and they are capable of excesses of self-pity and whining that would degrade the most pusillanimous peoples of history. Remembering that, we shall be chary about our generalisations on ohr own national character, even when we attribute to ourselves complacency. But at least we can affirm that New Zealanders have acquired or inherited the knack of getting about the tvorld. Christmas is the great season when thoughts are focused on home. Thoughts will De winging their way here from every point of the compass. While Ave are celebrating Christmas in the fashion suited to our summer climate and the opportunities our sea-coast and countryside afford, men and women from almost every land in the seven seas will be thinking of us and trying

By KOTARE

in memory and imagination to share with us the Christmas delights that hard circumstance is denying to them this year. Almost you might say the New Zealander has adopted the motto of the Artillery and has achieved übiquity. This tendency of the New Zealander to wander alar is not merely a product of the wars. I have been trying to locate the men who sat with me in a New Zealand school sixth form or who studied with me in one of our university colleges forty years ago. One is in Alaska, a groat mining man these days. One is in Somaliland, head of the Geological Department there. There are several in Central and South America. More than one are in Japanese prison camps in China or Malaya. Two spent most of their lives in Burma, wherever they are to-day. There are some in Africa, from the Sudan to the Cape, and from Zanzibar to the Belgian Congo. Many went forth out of my ken altogether. And that was only a small company of typical New Zealandcrs, boys born and bred like the rest of us to whom the wanderlust was irresistible when the call came. Way of Bobbing Up New Zealanders have a way of bobbing up all over the place. Two Otago brothers established and ran the desert motor service from the Mediterranean to Bagdad. Another Otngo man drove the main highway through Turkestan and wrote an enthralling book about it. Once, on a ship passing Socotra, 1 got into conversation with a man leaning on the rail beside me who told me lie had visited the island and found to his amazement a New Zealander there. There used to circulate in Singapore a story about a New Zealander of vast bulk who fell out of a tree in the excitement of a tiger hunt in Malaya, and landed fairly on a tiger's back, with fatal results to the tiger. The war has, of course, immenselv accelerated and widened the migratory process. Think of the immense area from which Christmas thoughts are speeding to this little country as a focal point. Our airmen in Canada and ilie United States, airmen in Britain. North Africa, Syria, India and the Pacific, airmen perhaps over enemy lands; fighting men in Italy and in various parts of the Pacific; officers sent from here to India; prisoners of war in various parts of Europe and Kastern Asia; navy men in all the oceans of the world or in training schools in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Airmen in Russia It is a mighty, incredibly dispersed company we link up with in spirit on the Christmas of the fifth year of the war. Some may still be in Russia, for it was a New Zealander who led the British air reinforcements in Russia in her darkest days. It is even possible that some of our men still are righting with the guerillas in Greece and Crete and Yugoslavia. Wherever they are, their deepest thoughts are with us to-day. The least we can do is to spare time to think of them with pride and gratitude.