WHAT MEN GET USED TO.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12818, 18 March 1905, Page 1 (Supplement)

WHAT MEN GET USED TO.

[BY TO HUNG A.]

TiiKiiu is really nothing to which men can't get used, provided it doesn't kill the lot.

They will get used to high explosives, twelve-mile guns, military mines, and fancy shells that make a deserted brickfield of any spot they strike just as they have got used to everything else. Why not? It is only novelty that alarms, familiarity always breeds a certain amount of contempt. When we read of this terrific battle of Mukden .'t really appears at the moment as '.hough such infernal war could not possibly last on the earth. We forget that war was always infernal, and that whenever a new weapon was invented it has looked as though men would never want to light again. Did you never read of the indignation of the mail-clad knights when the first cannon balls came hurtling along the ground and leg-before-wicket meant out no matter what leggings you wore. And can you not imagine what they thought in France when the English long-bow gave to a handful of raiders easy victories over the greatest armies France could raise, and in two or three hours made as many widows as the Japanese have made in as many weeks? The world is only doing what it has always done, adapting its highest scientific and industrial knowledge to the art of war. High explosives and long-range guns are the accompaniments of electric motors, fasttrains, deep mining, turbiued liners, and all that sort of thing. They all give us a bit of a start when we first run across them, but we get used to them all. It is wonderful what men will get used to. Is there anything that they won't? Wo talk of high explosives, but if there is one thing more than another calculated to make the marrow of the spine freeze .solid it is to see a miner, a (juarryman, or a bushman who has stumps to get out hand ling dynamite on a. cold morning. That is until you get used to it. Out. comes a grey, dingy candle-like stick from an old box in the corner of the whare. John Smith, preparing to start work, handles it fondly, presses it in his hands, ties it inside the bosom of his shirt. "I'll Lave to warm it up," he says, and produces the fiying-pan. In it goes and over the lire, the pan being moved about as you would move a newlywritten letter that you are drying over the lamp. "What is it?" you ask. "Just a bit o' dynamite.' - replies John Smith casually. And you feel your hair begin to rise, and your flesh to creep, and your marrow to freeze. Dynamite! You daren't run, partly because you are afraid of being found afraid and partly because you don't want to disturb John Smith at a critical moment, and partly because you know hat it is no use, and that vour doom has come. Dvnamite!

There it is, over the lire, and you in the same room with it, and you wouldn't take a thousand million pounds to bo there if you could get out without being noticed. And in a week all you say is: " Hurry up. Jack! One would think you were afraid of the stuff. Get. it- warm quick and let's go.'' And every once in a while, if not in your wharo in somebody else's whare, it does "go." Hut nobody minds. Man is built that way. He gets used to anything. Ou sailing coasts, lishing coasts, stormy coasts, it is rare to find any sailing family that has not given lives to the sea. Nor one life only, for it is not infrequent to jind families who as far bank as memory goes have rarely had a man die in his bed. The sea takes them, sooner 01 laterand

these are the very men who follow the .sea instinctively; and take a. strange delight in staking their lives against its treasures. So much so that, they have saturated their nations with then spirit, and we no more dream that a real man would fear to be sailor because of its risks than that a real woman would fear to nurse her sick child

because of infection. Yet the sailor, the fisherman, not only offers his life once but over and over again ; not only offers it singly but collectively; he may be swept overboard, be struck by a spar, or be lost with the whole ship's company on a foundering ship. Notwithstanding this, it never occurs to us to give up sailing, to fear the sea. for we have all got used to it. But. was there not a time when it was strange and

terrible, before-men built boats that steered, and arc. there not still on the earth multi-

tudes of people, the vast majority, who can no more take to salt water than liens to a duckpond? They have had no chance to get used In it. ami consequently haven't. We make all sorts of theories as to what men can endure, and as to what tiling are unendurable. There is one great English philanthropist who is now trying to con vine!.- the world that the kindest war to

Ed a condemned murderer is to keep him in ignoipuco of the day or flic momenl whereon he is '.o die. You put him into a patent cell, and at some indefinite moment poisonous gas is poured into it. Ii may be the instant after the judire iia.< sentenced him or the year after. This will save the poor wretch from the torture of counting the days and hours to his doom, says our philanthropist. A pretty theory ! As pretty as the theory that men cannot sustain the terrible, tension of expecting to bo blown into the air from beneath, or to he crushed into the earth from above, and that therefore the use of high explosives cannot con. tinue. Why not? We have become used

to all sorts of civilised perils, all of a very terrible character, and now do not worry over them as much as the uncivilised do over wild boasts.

Men get. used to anything. In Sydney, when the famous plague first appeared, there was a deadly fear in everybody's heart, and it would have taken very little to make a, panic. But as the weeks wore on, though the plague increased beyond all expectations, everybody got used to it. The prompt closing of hotel doors when an occupant, was discovered to have plague, and the hustling off to quarantine of casual drop-pers-in at the bar, made Sydney laugh, not shiver. In an astonishingly short time plague was reduced to the place in the public mind occupied by/the diseases to which everybody is accustomed. The miner too. what does he not face in

the everyday business of his life? Dee)), deep down, into the very bowels of the earth, he will go for a few paltry shillings a day. A fall of earth ends a life, an explosion ends a hundred lives, but mining does not stop. " Caller herring" may be called '"lives of men," but so may coal and gold. Yet we all keep on. We are used to it. A tunnel is projected, and with every chain a man is killed. Bnshfelling is

thought nothing of, but insurance offices went five per cent, of all wages paid to insure those who work at it against the limited liability of accident; and how many countrv lads hesitate to swing an axe against a tree? Life is full of risks, terrible risks, but we are all u-ed to them. And s-r with modem war. Even ii' a gun would carry a thousand miles we should still get used to it.

It isn't the risks of war 11• =»t will slop it, but the growing sense of kinship among men. It was the kill in? of brother by brother that first shocked mankind, then the killing of neighbour bv neighbour : then, within the nation, bum law insisted that slaughter should cease. And when nations begin to mix freely with nations, to travel in one another's countries, and to make friends and relations, irrespective of national borders, to fight with one another and kill one another becomes an insensate, stupid, wicked thing. If peonies want to fight the weapons that are most effective are necessarily the best, and no weapon is so terrific that men cannot become used to it. It is when peoples do not want to fight with one another, when nt the bottom of their hearts they feel friendly with one another, that war horrifies mid saddens them, whether it is war with sticks and stones or with guns good at twelve miles. Those who are determined to settle their disputes by war will alwavs do it. whether it is in living ships two thousand "arris up in din ;>'••• fir in submarines 1 '"" !i"'">i-~-' : fathoms deep under the sea; no danger will :,>)>. t' em !>or"i;uienl.lv. no i i.-.k will nuke them afraid, lint when their hearts are nut i'i the busine-s at all! What will I hey do then? A victory over those of whom they think as kinsmen, friends-, and brothers (Hilv hulls them. Thev can never boast of it and be proud or. it because they can »— ij- ttel used to it.