WARTIME CHRISTMAS HEADLINES

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

WARTIME CHRISTMAS HEADLINES

By E. M. BLAIKLOCK

IT is an ill trick that Hitler has played us. Three score and ten are the Christmases of our allotted span, and the Fuehrer has coloured five already a Nazi brown. Among the summer holidays of the remembered years, which should blend and blur with memories of sea and sand, cool bush tracks and the blue smoke of fires against the pohutulcawa trees, these five will stand apart. If, as the Roman said, the memory itself of ill is pleasant in happier days, the sweeter memory in our carnal moments will be the end of the spoiler who marred the day. • How thoroughly he had done it we did not realise five summers ago. all seemed impossible at Christmas time in 1939, a bad dream from which we must awake and find ourselves back at the Coronation. Big Ben had boomed the hour, and sure enough we were at war with Germany. against evil things," said Mr. Chamberlain—"brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them 1 am certain that right will prevail " How just to go about it was the rub The leaflets were snowing down on Germanv. "Achtung! Achtung! To the German' people. Your Government's hope of a blitzkrieg has been destroyed hv the British Cabinet's decision to prepare for a three-years' war. . . . The Maginot Line Meanwhile the Graf Spee was down, and there had been devilry at sea, but now the joke, was on the Reich. The Siegfried Line, where the washing was to hang, was full of water and influenza, while Maginot had given his poilus electrie stoves. So we crouched that sunituer under Mr. Chamberlain's umbrella and contrived a Christmas holiday. Was it twelve months or twelve years to the next Christmas? There have been centuries which have seen the world change less. The finest hour was pouring its last grains of sand. In the "strong City of Refuge" we were fighting "by ourselves alone but not for ourselves ' alone." And not quite alone. Greece, sturdily with us among the snows of the Aeroceraunian mountains.

had ripped the sawdust casing of the Italian Caesar.

„ The island wall was hard behind our backs. "Boomps-a-Daisy had been left with the lorries on the beach at Dunkirk to the reliei of the sane, and riddled weckage ot the Luftwaffe lay 011 the fields of Kent. The Empire lived" in strange communion. The radio knit our hopes and fears together. We nourished hopes oddly enough. There were bombs on the Ruhr instead of paper, and Bardia was under British guns. The holly was red when the Prime Minister asked Italy to give in ! Twenty thousand men were marching on Benghazi. Across the Channel an enemy, of whose might we still had no conception, waited for the Empire ' to be logical and surrender. Still we contrived a holiday. The Leander was sleek and grey as she slipped past Rangitoto. Japan Comes In Then came 1941. The cherry blossom had sprouted bayonets. The yellow men hammering at Batan, and crawling through trie Malayan rubber groves, iiad spoilt the war. The wreck of a German army was strewn along the Vyazma rond and events were working out Napoleonically. Moscow had not •alien in six weeks, and General January of the old Tsar's word was bringing up his white reserves. But now there were new maps to watch with the old exasperation of the Flanders days and Greece. Ipoh. Penang and Johore for Larissa. Thermopylae and Argos! But Singapore was waiting, even though the two fine ships were in the locker with half the Pearl Harbour fleet. It was the worst Christmas of rhem all. The war seemed to stretch ahead an unimaginable vista of spoiled and baffled years. The little pleasures .»f that shadowed holiday bulked large. The manuka had never been so white.

It was dusty snow on the summer hills, and there were peaceful trees which had waited for us to walk and see them. Twelve months saw the dawning. "The victory gleam," said Winston Churchill, "is 011 the helmets of our troops." They were thrusting in the outposts of the foe, creeping through the Tunisian hills, pouring west along the well-known desert ways from Alamein. In Papua and the Solomons far strongholds were crumbling. Before Stalingrad another German host was a ruin in the snow. The high full tide had all hut reached the Volga and the Nile. It had touched the Coral Sea, and now, slowly, surely, the wet sands were showing. The tide was on the ebb.

"There Is Hope" And the last twelve months have passed with leaden feet. "Though there be darkness," runs a verse in .Job in the Revised Version, "it shall be as the morning, and thou shalt be secure because there is hope." No Christmas since Hitler's star rose high has been so full of it. The iron ring closes round the Reich. From foxhole to foxhole the yellow men fall back on Tokyo. Retribution, after three years' march from far Somalilnnd, climbs slowly up the Apennines and seems not to count the months. Hope, freed at last from the days of chilling fear grows, restive and impatient. Life and treasure needed for a gladder world are spent on distatft battlefields where / bad men hide behind their screen of dupes. For how lonti vet? Does next year bold the end? Will one glad month' see death at 3erchtesgaden. and roaring crowds outside Goehbels' windows? Will next Christmas bring back the remembered seas, the yellow sand and the cool, groen leaves of distant bush, the days of little things, and no more news? Or will Tnjo. who spoilt 1941. spoil 1941 as well? May Fujiyama smoke with fumes not made at home.