SANDY’S CORNER

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 89, Issue 213, 8 September 1945, Page 4

SANDY’S CORNER

Reduction in taxation, not this year, next year. Sounds to us like the stones on your plate—this year, next year, sometime, never. MANY VISITORS There are many visitors to the city to-day, most of them with that stonemoral look about them, which has a habit of changing by late afternoon to a look of injured innocence. It is really surprising how many stone morals are not stone morals on the day. The greatest handicap to stone morals seems to be other stone morals running alongside them. Some people won't agree with you there. They’ll blame weather, turf, jackey, trainer, owner, stewards, and everybody, but their own judgment. THE KINDLY RED CROSS. On every hand, whenever you mention the name Red Cross to a repatriated prisoner of war, his face lights up. There is no doubt about the genuineness of the regard these boys have for that organisation. But for the patriotic parcels the Red Cross handed out many of those lads who managed to live through the ordeal they experienced would not have done so. These boys bear so little evidence to-day of what they have been through, that it is hard to understand their stories. But what a contrast can take place in young bodies in a short space of time in the right, kindly hands. One of them said yesterday that when he landed at an air station in England the crowd of them were awaited on by W.A.A.F.’s. “The tables were laden with good things, hut we all felt nervous,” he said. “We just couldn't eat. I suppose the girls thought it was a poor sort of reception hut after four years in a prison, on bad food, in bad conditions, you sort of feel out of place amongst a team of kindly girls plying you with eats.”

The experiences of all these boyi seems to have been the same though there appear to be variations as between officers and other ranks. Officers, apparently, got slightly better treatment than other ranks in German hands. The same, apparently, was not the case in the hands of the Japanese. When the boys come back from Japan and countries the Japanese have held, they will probably not look so well as the lads we have welcomed home these last few weeks from Europe. The Red Cross did its utmost to get parcels to those prisoners in the Far East, but was not successful, and Japan has no reason to feel proud of her treatment of Allied prisoners, nor of efforts we made to succour them. If those lads are not in the best of health everything possible must be done for them and all allowances made. The same appl’es to all prisoners, of course, to all servicemen, too. To-day is a day of getting out of the Army* and there is no reason to suppose that it does no t differ from getling out 25 years ago. The aches and nains of after life gathered in the frenches were not felt on the day of freedom nor the dav after, but they came relatively early. That is why some after-care fund is needed in this Dominion to aid these men when the hardships of war may take their toll. It is then that that wonderful organisation the Red Cross can again apply its kindly hand.