Compassionate Confusion

By last week the affairs of the "Middle East Compassionate Posting Committee" had reached the House of Commons, but still no solution of a delicate problem was in sight.

The committee (better known as "the Baby Leave Committee") was formed when British soldiers who had been in the Middle East for several years began applying for posting to "compassionate leave"* because they "wanted to have a baby before the old woman gets too old." More than 5,000 applications flooded the new committee before it even settled down to work.

About half of these were weeded out. Said a committee member: "Men whose wives are under 35 have a boxful of time in which to become parents." But even soldiers whose claims to prospective fatherhood had been ruled legitimate found that their posting was likely to be theoretical: the shipping shortage allowed only 200 or 300 Middle East soldiers to get home each month.

Plagued by anxious wives and uniformed husbands, the Secretary of State for War, Sir James Grigg, told the House of Commons that it had been a mistake ever to let the committee's work become public knowledge. There the matter uneasily rested.

* British military lingo for furloughs granted because of domestic emergencies, etc.

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