The importance of urgency in the fight to save civilization

This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Feb. 7, 1942.

Acountry at war needs poets and singers, great and small leaders, and above all, ordinary people who have driving power and enthusiasm. For when the news is bad, the heart grows heavy and there is a sense of dread that lies like a dead hand on the world. This is all a definite part of the Axis strategy, and when we feel it coming on, we must rouse ourselves like the lost traveller in a blizzard.

This is no time for any one to sit down and cry, for the greatest hour humanity has ever known is upon us. I believe this year of 1942 will largely decide humanity’s fate for the next 100 years. This is no time to die either, for we need every person, every person who can turn a furrow, sow a seed, fashion a garment or earn a dollar to help our country. Everyone is needed in this great struggle from which there is no turning back.

Many of us have grieved over the fall of the League of Nations and go back in bitter memory, saying, here is the place we should have stood firm. Here is the place we should have made an outcry; but now we have a new League of Nations, forged with fire and sealed with blood, 26 united nations, united because they must unite or perish one by one.

Let us ask ourselves now, our awakened, repentant selves, what are we going to do this time? Are we going to leave it all to the leaders, or are we really going to work? Let us never forget that individuals do count. Let us never make little of small duties.

Take the matter of salvage. We were all enthusiastic when we heard the call come for old spectacles, dental plates, silk stockings, old gloves, toothpaste tubes, pasteboard and old magazines. We were sure we would search the house diligently and bring in everything. The newspapers have done their best to remind us, lists have been left in mail boxes; nothing more was needed but a little effort, a little honest hand work. But some say we just did not get the stuff rounded up. We usually thought of it when we were on our way to town, or in church.

I did make one grand all-out effort to round up the papers and cardboard. Early one Monday afternoon I tied a red handkerchief over my head and went to the basement. I left word that I was not to be called, even to the telephone, and I told myself sternly that everything must go. Times marches on! This is a new day — old things have passed away.

I attacked boxes that haven’t been opened for years, for I was in a ruthless mood. I had read a magazine article about why women save things and had learned that there are three kinds of savers, and recognized myself in all three.

I know only one person who is a more inclusive saver than I am, for she saves milk bottle caps. However, I saw myself now as a reformed character and I began to lay down, in the bottom of the carton I had brought with me, old files of newspapers, firmly pushing my desire to read them before I let them go. Suddenly, my eye caught a headline: “Health and History,” and I felt I must see what that was about.

It was an article by Beverly Nichols pleading with every person to get interested in gardening, so that the world would be free from war.

“The gardener,” he writes, “who sows and reaps, wants everyone to be happy and in his zeal to make things grow, loses his pugnacious instincts.”

When Japan left the League of Nations, Nichols was reporting in the gallery. He saw members sweltering in the heat and smoke. It was impossible to distinguish faces after the first hour. Some of the members were late coming in for they had been attending luncheons. They were too full of heavy food and wine.

He writes: “I fell to thinking of all the acids that must be fermenting in these distinguished stomachs, of old hearts pumping oversugared blood through hardened arteries, and I asked myself if it is through such men and such conditions that we shall ever reach the peace that the world craves.”

I tore myself away from this interesting reading, for I knew it was futile, as all post-mortem evidence is futile. But I fell again when I took out the next file, which had to do with the ordination of women in the United Church of Canada.

It seemed like an echo from a far distant world, and yet at the time I remember that it was a major consideration. I was getting along pretty well filling up the carton until I came to copies of the Weekly Scotsman, and there I began to read an article on the derivation of proper names; and the first thing I knew the basement was growing dark and the afternoon was gone. I had had a pleasant time, but the salvage campaign was still in its preliminary stages.

But one morning soon after, that there was a knock at the door and there stood one of the neighbours — the champion onion grower of the district who had been a well-known trainer of race hoses in his younger days in the South Midlands. He is an attractive little man, with bright blue eyes and a schoolboy’s complexion.

He was dripping wet, because the cold December rain was pelting down. He came into the kitchen just long enough to explain his errand. He was looking after the salvage for our district, he said, or at least for part of it — paper, cardboard, newspapers, magazines; they were needed for cartridges, and needed at once.

“Leave it out there in the woodshed” — pointing to the very place — “and get everything you can, for the call is urgent. We will call tomorrow afternoon with the truck.”

There was something about this gallant little fellow, in his soaking wet macintosh, that convicted me. I urged him to have a cup of coffee and let me hang his coat up to dry, but he assured me he must be on his way. I said something too about the bad weather.

“This is something we can do,” he said, “but we must be prompt. No, no, I don’t mind the rain or the walking, not me; for I am a young man yet, not quite 83 years old and sound in wind and limb; and besides, I have four grandsons over there you know — good boys, two in the air force and two in the navy. Not that that matters; we are all in this.”

I watched him walking briskly down the lane. He might have been singing, There’ll Always Be An England, at any rate he was proclaiming it in every step. He is part of the Britain that will never be defeated. The Britain that stopped Hitler. The Britain that has held the pass for all mankind.

That day there was a real roundup of the salvage. Everyone worked at it. Under the spell of that 83-year-old, with his kindly twinkling eyes, I even parted with a pile of Time and Tide, which ran back to the last war. And just as the old man said, the truck did come the next day. Piled high with papers and cardboard, tied up as he had directed, the truck swung up the lane — the old horseman had quickened the conscience of Gordon Head.

That’s what I mean when I say we need people with enthusiasm. People who can import the feeling of urgency. Some of McClung’s columns from the 1930s and 1940s have been collected in a book, The Valiant Nellie McClung: Selected Writings by Canada’s Most Famous Suffragist, by Barbara Smith.