THE WAR MEMORIAL.

Southland Times, Issue 19458, 24 January 1925, Page 7

THE WAR MEMORIAL.

To the Editor. ! Sir, —I should like space to express a ! few ideas concerning the controversy at ; present raging in Invercargill on the <. nation of whether or not names should be I placed on the war memorial, I may *.iy I that I wrote the Committee about 18 • months or two years ago, and in my jx>s9es--1 sion I still have their reply—that they in- ! tended to place on the monument all the i names of Southland boys who enlisted, irrespective of the place they joined up at or | the contingent with w'hich they served. I . transferred to them £l2 10/- in hard cash : I had paid up on 25 shares in a certain dairy factory. That cut out the interest thereon, or the dividend belonging to their own shareholders away facing the German guns. The mother or widow of those killed in action could neither get the principal nor the interest on it. One widow with six sodj away at one and the same time, and £l5 paid on 30 shares, liable to be called on for the balance at any time, w’as turned off her farm by the mortgagee. I decided that my money was better in the provincial monument and I got that promise—that all ; Southland boys, as mine and thousands of : others were, should have their names inscribed on it, to hand down to posterity their ! glorious achievement. I propose, if that ' promise is not carried out, to get a solicitor ,to recover the money. This business has the appearance of obtaining money under false pretences. i I personally know’ of parents in my dis- , trict—now aged—who lost all the male repI resentatives of the name—wiped out, in fact. : A widow, a relation of ours, had two sons i lost in action, and their names are not ! to be handed down to posterity. I, and near- ■ ly all of us, know of three killed in action in one family multiplied several times over. This action causes me to think of the shirkers, and one lot in particular, who got all the way from Christchurch to the head of Lake Wakatipu, and thence overland to Mar- ’ tin’s Bay in the dense bush, away from all communication with the outer world, in order to evade their duty to the State. When they were caught the paper termed them “fine-looking specimens of bipeds.” I had some, little acquaintance with a party who made a two-year tour of England and the Continent, and saw frequent letters to relatives while away. All breathed of seei ing English history, not reading of it—- ! especially London’s monuments, and Nel--1 son’s monument in Trafalgar Square in par- • ticular. Why Nelson’s name at all? Why I not a monument to the victory of the ■British Fleet over the combined French and i Spanish fleets? The Admiral, a parson’s son, got that as the battle was about won, and the French Admiral was later shot by the French for losing it—a pair of fools. They would both have been better at home under the bed, or at Martin’s Bay growing peas and potatoes. The British, children the world over must have Nelson, Welling- , ton, Kitchener, Marlborough, Moore, Rob- : erts, Haig, Blake, Abercrombie, Wolfe, and • dozens of inglorious Miltons and Oliver I Cromwells dinned into their heads. And ■ the pick of Southland’s volunteers must not Ibe named on our monument to suit the i high ideals of a newspaper and a Committee I of the Upper Ten, after about £lO,OOO was ’ collected for it, and they took six years’ expenses out of it.—l am, etc., JAMES I). SHEPHERD. Gorge Road, January 21. j [Our correspondent has overlooked the fact that the Committee has reversed its former decision and will now inscribe on the monument the names of those who died overseas. Portion of the above letter has, out of regard for the law of libel, been deleted.— ; Ed, S.T.]