BOYS AND FIGHTING

Waipa Post, Volume 43, Issue 3353, 24 September 1931, Page 7

BOYS AND FIGHTING

A MOTHER'S POINT OF VIEW.

(By the Hon. Mrs Tahu Rhodes, in the Daily Express.)

Daily Express readers have been discussing disarmament. Peace petitions are being organised. There has even been some lecturing on disarmament in the nurseries.

I am told that as a modern mother I should spring clean my children's play boxes and cast into outer darkness those beloved leaden regiments so arduously collected and so full of groggy veterans.

Away must go the pop-guns, say my earnest friends, away the water pistol, and away the wobbly tin sword and the drum, with its pictures of ducks in sailor hats, drilling. Well, I refuse to do it. Quite frankly, I want my sons to grow up possible fighters. I hated the war as much as every one else; I quite understand, without having to go to any mass meetings to be told about it, that war is wasteful, unintelligent and disastrous. I entirely approve of my children being taught to understand the true implication of modern warfare, but I refuse to pretend I want them kept ignorant of the tradition and prestige of the British Army. As for the toy guns and nursery warfare, I am, I repeat, all for them. Most normal children have something in them that responds emotionally and exaltedly to the drum, and it is ridiculous to discredit this feeling, call it base, and smother it in pretentious theorising.

My boys' father is a soldier, and fought throughout the war—my elder children were then babies, so I am not likely to under-estimate the heartbreaks and nerve-racking jiTixieties of that time. Am I to teach them to cut his profession dead, as though he had been an embezzler or a crooked company promoter? Never shall I forget the horror of an "advanced" mother to whom I confided the proud fact that my eldest son had won the middle weight boxing competition at his preparatory school. She told me the worst about little boys who box, and it was very bad indeed—but I don't believe it.

Boxing does not engender ferocity in childish hearts. The mildest man I know was one heavy weight champion in the navy. Scientific self-de-fence is one of the best tutors a boy can have. With it he learns control, patience, pluck, and poise. Above all, he works off on his punch ball all those repressions that my modern mother was so concerned about. Beware of freaks. If there is one thing our children want more than another it is normal treatment. It is no good turning our school rooms into theatres in which an incessant drama of pretence is being staged. It is, I suppose, only one step logically from the game of toy soldiers to the cadet corps. I can see no rea-

son why either should be abolished. The line of argument adopted by the modern theorists seems to be this:— "War is terrible, so we must do our best to abolish it. Let us set about this by first making all our rising generations as unfit for war as possible. Let us merely tell them how beastly it is and leave it at that."

It seems to be that this is rather like saying: "Disease is horrible. If you should catch a germ have nothing whatever to do with it."

No. Unless we carry the thing through logically, like Tolstoy's noncombatants in his story of the drum, it is no good ignoring self-defence in education. It will be remembered that the people in the story decided that war was silly, so they let an invading army take possession of evei-ything they had rather'than join with them in battle. They felt it was better to lose everything rather than begin killing each other.

I have not arrived at that point of view, and I shall not encourage my children to do so.