This is Not a Merry Christmas

THIS is the grimmest Christmas that we British people have known for hundreds of years. We face terrifying realities.

The modern Hun—a queer, horrible creature, a combination of the callous, robot mind of the German with the beastliness of the Nazi—is battering at England’s door. As he sees the spoils, over which he slobbered in September in greedy anticipation, getting farther away, while England’s strength grows, his attack becomes more savage, more brutal and sense less.

We escaped, in 1940, dangers which beggar description. But there are more to come. If we are to remain a free people, we may have to endure, in 1941, trials and sacrifices such as we never have known. If we are to conquer the monster that our bumble footed diplomacy, unchecked capital ism and fantastic theorising let loose upon the world in 1938-39, we must be prepared for things that, last Christmas, would have seemed a lunatic’s dream.

But, because victory goes, inevitably, to the people with the strongest morale, we need not fear the future.

We know now what we did not know a year ago, that there is no weakness in the British spirit—that it is, in deed, unconquerable.

The record of these past ten months is magnificent—there has been nothing like it, in memory. Our people have been battered from Arras

to Dunkirk, smashed flat in London and Coventry, treacherously attacked and sunk in Atlantic darkness, des troyed by grossest incompetence among Norwegian mountains—but every man—and woman—has died without a whimper, his chin high and his spirit triumphant. In fact, the courage of our people, of all classes, at all times, in all circumstances— whether attacking an enormously stronger Graf Spee, or being filthily buried in a London slum, or gallantly rescuing comrades from a “hell-ship”, or tackling a 20-to-l enemy in Eng land’s skies—has been so unvarying, among all classes, that probably it will supply the future historian with one of the most glorious chapters in our history.

The world, in centuries to come, will thank God for this gallant British snirit; for, had it not been for the capacity of the British people to “take it”, the Hun must have triumphed, and personal freedom, and most of the decencies of life, would have vanished from the earth.

It is a grim Christmas—not much merriment for those whose friends are being bombed in England, and whose relations are on active service somewhere; little peace of heart for those who recoernise the strains and stresses we all must endure before the tide turns, and victory begins to flow our way. • But, at least, there is consolation in the thought that the spirit of our

race has been proved, refined and hardened in this cruel fire of war.

These people who, with such gallant courage, fouerht off the apparently irresistible onslaught of the Hun, will not be content with the muddled, selfish organisation of society which ruled their lives prior to 1939. They will—and rightly—demand the new world that already they have earned.

There is a bad time coming for pro fessional politicians, “guinea-pig” directors, privileged nincompoops, and all the rest of the parasitical rubbish which has fastened itself upon our national economy in the fat and easy days of peace. Sometimes, to this writer, the possibilities of the peace of to-morrow appear more terrifying than the actualities of the war of to day. * * « IT is a hellish prospect that we see, this Christmas. There is no joy in it. But there is solid comfort in the thought of the dangers we have escaped, the proof that we have of the fine snirit of our young men, and the assurance thus given of ultimate victory and a cleaner and better world.

Mr. Thomas Watson, an old resident of the Cook Islands, died at Arorangi, Raro tonga. in September. The late Mr. Wat son, many years a well-known planter, had retired to his plantation to live en tirely alone, and it was not until three days after he passed away that he was found dead from heart failure. A large number of European and Maori friends attended the funeral.