HATS OFF!

Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 46, 24 July 1915, Page 3

HATS OFF!

But do not Shout!

THE psychology of a crowd is an enthralling study, and the study of our own local crowds is more interesting than the study of most crowds. A very small proportion of Auckland's wounded men returned to this city on> Friday last. Some of them are exceedingly ill, ■shattered in nerve and broken in body. Auckland turned out en mass. Every kind of official and every kindl of citizen went to see the homecoming of these broken m en—and Auckland cheered. When these men left Auckland, sound, ■confident, fit and well, Auckland took not the faintest interest. Guardls of honour saluted and brass band's brayed on Friday, an extraordinary contrast. One is unable to decide whether wounded and eick men love being made an exhibition •of, or whether they care about being mustered on a public platform to have speeches fired' at them. If the emotional demonstration, is any ■criterion of the practical help wounded soldiers are to get, then perhaps it was excusable. At present its utility is not obvious. Nobody cheers a citizen when he gets influenza, or typhoid, or a broken leg, and no citizen wants anybody to compliment him for becoming ill. * * *

If any wounded soldier is killed with kindness, at least the people will have had their show, but the point is that the soldiers who returned on Friday represent only .a minute proportion of the shattered men New Zealand! will receive and that such exhibitions will be■come commonplaces. The homecoming was a novelty and the people cheered the novelty. Such occasions might reasonably be supposed to be sacred to the relatives of the injured, but the mere curiosity of the crowd made it difficult for mothers and sisters 1 and brothers to reach their soldier sons ox relatives. Perhaps the imagination of the dense crowds was fired! with the thought that here were men who had looked death in, the eye; men who had cheerfully braved the hellish business of war; men who had ■"fought on. the plains of Troy" and who above all else typified the unity of an Empire which must remain great at all cost of life and limb and money. These men represent the hair-line that divides life from death. They are the men who by the grim humour of war have not been killed!, a reminder that "the one shall be taken and the other left." The. demonstration of admiration ie less useful than the quiet preliminary work of raising funds to help the wounded. It is fashionable for public men to declare "this is no time for speeches"—and to make speeches. Public speeches to the wounded make no bulletsi. They don't even make a single bandage or a splint.

If wounded soldiers are occasions for a public holiday, their exhibition may have the effect of spurring the large army of sightseers to retaliation for these wounds. If the sight of a shattered soldier whose nerve® are being torn to ribbons by "brass bands and shouting admirers Induces some of the ehouters to go to the place where bayonets are more useful than shouts then one supposes the exhibition has its uses. Maybe there is some official reason for appealing to the morbid side of the people's character. The people may feel a desire to get even with "the. enemy who caiised Jim to be paralysed, Joe to bobble out on ■crutches and Bill to be blind' all his

life. If Jim and Joe and Bill are stimulants to recruiting and not a mere free show —very well. Perhaps after all the exhibition was a stroke of official genius.

The fact to keep in mind is that the wounded heroes who returned to Auckland are an infinitieima! grain in the great international harvest of hell; that millions of men are similarly shattered; that these represent the less serious casualties and that it is but the beginning of our own particular harvest. Perhaps it teaches us that the surest way to make such scenes less frequent is to still send men to the aid of the King's soldiers who have tackled the biggest military problem in all history. If the sight of any one of these wounded sold/iers made any young man decide "it's up to me it was not altogether a bad sight. And in the near future, no one need decide that it is up to him, for it will be up to everybody who is capable of facing the hell these men have escaped from. There is less purpose in shattering the nervesi of wounded soldiers' with clamorous shouts than in hastening to the place where one can reduce the chances of casualty.