HOW THEY GOT THERE

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 8, 21 May 1945, Page 26

HOW THEY GOT THERE

A KORERO Report

The rooms are empty, now The trestle tables have been stacked away. The crates, the piles of timber, the cans of food have gone. The women who worked there — skillfully, voluntarily, gladlyhave gone back to their homes. Their work is over. For the war in Europe is ended. The Kiwi captives have left their cages. They can come home, now. So there is a silence over the gaunt, brick building, 96 Tory Street, Wellington, parcel-packing centre for the Joint Council of the Red Cross and St. John. “ Parcel-packin’ mommas, send those parcels on,” sang fifty women, working shift after shift, assembling food-parcels at the rate of 7 a minute, so that our countrymen in stalags and campos would not starve. They sang that song for the last time on Friday, May 18. The last foodparcel number 1,139,624, was assembled. Then packing ceased. Whether repatriated or liberated, every prisoner had said, “ We owe our lives to the Red Cross and St. John food-parcels.” How was it possible to send New Zealand food into the heart of enemy lands with frontiers closed, with men and machines in bitter combat upon the land, on and under the sea, and in the air ? The story goes back to June 24, 1859, when Jean Henry Ducant, Swiss banker, chanced upon the battlefield of Solferino. French, Sardinian, and Austrian ambulances and medical stores, with no common distinguishing-marks, had been shelled to splinters. Sickened by the appalling condition of the neglected wounded (two doctors helpless amongst 6,000 casualties)

Ducant organized indiscriminate aid to the stricken soldiers, and returned to Switzerland, pledging himself to obtain internationally recognized medical services for all future wars. Passionately demanding respect and protection for all war-wounded in his book “ Recollections of Solferino,” Ducant organized a lawyer, a veteran general, and two doctors into a Swiss committee of action, which sponsored " An International Conference in Geneva of International and Permanent Relief Societies for Wounded Military Personnel in time of War.” So strong was their resolve to work for humanity, so great was their enthusiasm, that on October 26, 1863, delegates representing sixteen Governments assembled in Geneva. They agreed : 1. Every nation should possess a voluntary society, with highest Government patronage and encouragement, for the relief of suffering in war. 2. Those caring for the sick and wounded should be considered neutral. As a distinguishing-maik, a red cross on a white background (the reverse colours of the Swiss flag) was chosen for all medical services. On religious grounds, however, the red cross is replaced by the red crescent in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, and part of the U.S.S.R., and by the red lion and sun in Iran. The Red Cross emblem was first used and respected in the AustroPrussian war against Denmark, in the beginning, of 1846. But no binding convention yet had been prepared. So in Geneva, on August 22, a diplomatic conference of sixteen Govern-

ments’ representatives signed the great Convention of 1864 which for all time, laid down that it is the duty of warring nations to collect and care for sick and wounded soldiers, irrespective of nationality. In five years the horrors of the battle of Solferino had been outlawed by the first modern treaty to stand even when the signing powers went to war against ■one another. From the days of the original committee of five, the International Red Cross Committee in Switzerland has continued to guide the Red Cross movement. It is called international, not because it has sixty-two national societies, with over 20,000,000 members throughout the world, but because it acts as an intermediary between the nations. It is independent of all Governments. It has no standing in international law. Yet this committee of twenty-five Swiss citizens is the only existing body which attempts to keep Governments up to their Red Cross pledges. And it is through this vigilance that the Red Cross symbol continues to protect not only the surgeons, nurses, orderlies, drivers, and clerical and administrative staffs, but also all buildings, camps, ships, trains, and vehicles connected with humane medical work. This is a privilege without which Florence Nightingale and her first band of thirty-eight nurses (half of them nuns) set out for the Crimean War. It is an extension of the ideals of the Order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem—militant monks who tended and protected pilgrims to the Holy City in the twelfth century. The English Order of St. John (in wartime working in partnership with the British Red Cross as the Joint War Organisation) values these ancient traditions more highly than its title deeds contained in the charter granted in 1888, by Queen Victoria. But it is the Red Cross which has given the medical services a place and a mission apart from the armies in which they serve. Although its first great concern is for the wounded, International Red Cross aid at once becomes available the moment a man officially is listed prisoner of war.

Delegates regularly inspect and report upon camps by authority of the Hague (1899) and Geneva (1929) Conventions, which, while providing international laws for the treatment of prisoners, also place them under the protection of the International Red Cross. This, alone, made it possible for a vast supply of food and medical parcels to reach prisoners, who otherwise would have had to exist on a meagre diet supposedly equal to that of the captor’s second-line troops. From Great Britain (which sent out more than 12,000,000 parcels to the end of 1943), the Empire and the United States of America, parcels were shipped to the neutral port of Lisbon. From there specially chartered neutral vessels, paid for from the Joint War Organization funds, but sailing under the supervision of the International Red Cross, carried the parcels to Marseilles. Still under the same supervision, the stores were either sent in sealed trucks to bulk distributing centres in Germany, or to the main store at Geneva, from where the Red Cross guaranteed their delivery to the camps themselves. That’s the way New Zealand’s food parcels went. That’s how our countrymen, in enemy European cages, still managed, now and again, to make a stew of New Zealand lamb, to spread a little New Zealand honey on their bread.