ROMANCE AND BOY SCOUTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16234, 20 May 1916, Page 1 (Supplement)

ROMANCE AND BOY SCOUTS.

SERVING A COMMON CAUSE.

BY C. R. ALLEN.

I spent the greater part of our first great national anniversary with a troop of hoy scouts, and I think it was a day well kept. To these little citizens of this ratherjv painfully new country Trafalgar meant something, but Waitangi meant nothing. Labour Day meant a holiday, while Dominion Day, I suspect, left them cold. But Anzac Day was something they could understand, something that belonged to them. I waited for them at the little church which lay conveniently on the road to their base of operations, a beautiful little wooden church hidden among English trees in the glory of their autumn foliage. Presently they came swinging along the quiet road to- the thin but valiant music of three flutes to which the valiant tinkling of the little bell made answer. It was a blue sunny morning, and I think that the temperate sunlight, the still trees, the sound of running water and the occasional note of a tui or bellbird must have contributed in some measure to the atmosphere of true reverence that brooded over the little service, our tribute' to the men who, twelve months back, had written the second chapter of our history with their blood. Prom Old World to New. I tried to show them this truth by speaking first of Trafalgar, our borrowed inheritance, and then of the early settlers who wrote the first chapter of our own true history with the sweat of their brows. They had passed away, leaving us a country without the romance of primitive struggle. These boys dwelt in streets that had neither the wild beauty of primeval forests, not the deeper and more spiritually significant beauty of cities that have kept watch over man's mortality through the centuries. Materially, they were well provided fop, but they had little on which the imagination might thrive. Picture palaces and first-grade football matches may distend the mind. They cannot satisfy. It may simply have been the unheard-of novelty of going to church on a Tuesday morning that kept them attentive, but I trust that in some cases at least it was a faint realisation of their history and their heritage. The way is so plain to those who have come to this realisation, and happy is he who is made aware before he has lost the spring and sap of boyhood. He has acquired something that all the legislative panaceas in the world cannot give him. To him may be applied .Kipling's words to his own boy: —

Yours is the world, and everything that's in it. And, which is more, you'll be a man, my -son.

School Memories.

The little service came to an end, the boys possessed themselves of their kit which had been stacked in the church porch, and -we marched off for the base on the hill where the tui ß sing -with the best part of a blue day before us. The memory of it has found affinity with other memories that I count among- my truest possessions. These are school memories. I think of a somewhat ramshackle wooden assembly hall lined with photographs of school groups, framed prints of classical and historical interest, with a long black- I and-gilt honours board at one end, and a ' row of high, windows at the other. The < hacked and discoloured desks are hidden away, but the ceiling is still decorated with paper darts cunningly contrived With paper penholder and string, and cunningly sent to their billet aloft by some miscreant hand. The old big schoolroom at Wanganui no longer faces the Victoria Avenue. The boys of a later- generation foregather in a more dignified building. But nothing can destroy those edifices wherein we have learned truth. We carry them about with us. It is good for me to remember the soldierly figure of Sir William Russell as he stood on the " improvised platform at the end of the old schoolroom to distribute the prizes for the year and deliver ' his message to us. • ■ English Public School Spirit. In those days the poetry of Henry Newbolt was not' very widely known, so Sir William's rendering of those now hackneyed lines, " There's a breathless hush in the close*tonight," came with a freshness and significance which impressed them on my mind for all time. The haunting refrain at the end of each stanza, "Play up; play up, and play the game," I shall always associate with the manly restraint of his voice as I heard it on that summer evening in the old big schoolroom. He had recently lost a son in the South African war, and as he stoo3 there, a gentlemanly figure, erect under sorrow, he symbolised something that we New Zealanders lacked in those days. He could not have quoted from any living poet so happily as from Henry Newholt, for Newbolt expresses very intimately that spirit which has manifested itself so splendidly in the present crisis, the English public school spirit. There is running through all his work, both prose and verse, that fine flavour of romance which has been distilled from the life of those great institutions.

Lessons of the War. We are already beginning to consider after-war problems. It will be a thousand pities if all our thinking is to be done along the lines of trade and commerce. There are deep spiritual truths to be grasped and held, truths that have manifested themselves through the play of human character upon that vast and tragic stage. We cannot go back to the old ways of life. Society is in a state of flux. Our faith in many institutions has been shaken, but our faith in the true romance of service and brotherhood should be confirmed tenfold. The English public school, the English University may have to go The English aristocracy has to a large extent been wiped out in the terrific carnage. We cannot kit what will remain. We, in New Zealand, are a young democracy. Do not let us make the mistake of (supposing that we have nothing to learn from England, even old bad England as she was. We cannot afford to lose that spirit of restraint and discipline that gave to the best type of man turned out by the Pingpublic school his peculiar strength and his peculiar charm. Life without romance is a shoddy business, but we must have a romance' shorn of its expensive trappings, because we are a democracy. We do not want to breed a race of suspicious, complaining, and pampered self-seekers, as we were ill danger of doing before the war. There i.» something more essential to the future happiness of those boys for whom our men have made so great a sacrifice than the minimum of work and the maximum of wage. We must help him on his way to manhood. lam a believer in the boy ,-cout movement because it seems to me that a boy by becoming a scout puts himself in the way of attaining to what is be.-t in the life of a public school. The stately buildings, the mellowing influence of the Greek and Latin authors, the smooth close-cropped playing fields he may have to forego, but 'the companionship, the discipline that comes from serv- ■ ing a common cause, the share in the government of the little state, all these, await i him. and there is that one last heritage, , that most potent factor in romance, tradi- • tion. He can play the game because he is > a scout, just as the loyal and discerning ; Etonian plays the game fte.*uuse of Eton. • -Anyone who imagines that scouting is I simply playing at soldiers would do Veil 1 to read Kir Robert Baden-Powell's book, l Scouting fur Boys.'' There he will read .' that sconthood means knighthood. It . means the joyous quest, in short it means I being a gentleman.