PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16546, 20 November 1915, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

Lord Kitchener loft London suddenly for the Near East because of intelligence "sudden, grave, and unexpected"—says Sir J. A. Simon., speaking for the Government from his place in Parliament. Sir -J. A. Simon ought to have his parliamentary tongue clipped. Who are the happier for this blabbing? Only those who hate us. Why should mankind at large bo informed of our unwelcome surprises—of intelligence sudden, grave, and unexpected sprung upon us, making it necessary that our War Minister should vanish under cloud of night, disappearing for parts unknown? Few revelations could better please the public enemy. Ministers, it would seem, are less afraid of the public enemy than of pests private and domestic—-your Lynches, G-innells, and Ilogges, forsooth. Mr Lynch is a whitewashed rebel who fought against us in the Boer war; Mr 'G inn ell is an Irish malignant whose habit is slander; Mr Hogge is Mr Hogge and may be left at that. With these parliamentary terrors may be bracketed Sir A. B. Markham, a baronet of Mr Asquith's creating, who in some venomous aspersions on Lord Kitchener seems to have foreshadowed unwittingly his own destiny " Lord Kitchener in every stage, of his life had broken every man who interfered with him." Thanks be! Then we may reasonably hope . that he will break Sir A. B. Markham. I havo never despaired of the war, nor am I going to despair. But it is impossible to deny that on our side something like a rot has set . in. Our leaders not only quarrel, but in their quarrelling jet out the innermost War Office secrets. How explain their indifference to the danger of enlightening the enemy? It can't be that they are so idiotically cocksure of winning that this debauch of publicity seems to them of no importance. In effect we are trying to carry on the war by public meeting. Press and Parliament taken together are just that—a huge, vague, tempestuous, ungovernable, irresponsible public meeting. A war that might be won in the field may be lost at Westminster and in Fleet street It is a bad feature that we are obliged to let go a man of Mr Winston Churchill's energy, originality, and erratic genius. Nothing but piques, private and personal, have kept him out of the newly-invented War Council. He could haae done no harm there, and 1 inclusion would have saved his face. There is good stuff in Winston Churchill —he comes of a good stock; and for a twelvemonth at least he has had the grace to hold his tongue. It is bad that he must go; it is bad that the Government cannot control the influences that are thrusting him out; —that no power in the State seems able to silence the detractors of Lord Kitchener is worse. If this war is to be "muddled through," according to the British tradition, I should say that we are in the middle of the muddle just now—in the very thick of it. Some remarks in the Christchurch Press on the mischief done by Russell of The Times as war correspondent in the Crimea have led me to turn up Kinglake. "The decline and decay of our great expedition"; "lamentable failure"; "the eve of a great national disaster"; "hideous complication of fatal neglects''; "verge of ruin"; "the noblest army sacrificed" to the " grossest mismanagement," " in- ■ competency," '' lethargy," " aristocratic hauteur". " menaced with a disaster to which there can be found no parallel in the dreary annals of war''; "total disorganisation"; "collapse"; "anarchy"; " every man of any sense sinking into despair" ; " destruction of the British army" ; " final catastrophe"; " chaos come again, night, anarchy, and confusion"; — these, says Kinglake, were some of the strains in which—our enemy all the time thankfully listening—the great journal, inspired by its man on the spot, chanted our dirge. In furnishing useful information to the enemy, Mr Russell may be said to have been punctual and precise, even going so far as to indicate the exact position of a powder magazine on which enemy shells might play, and explaining the ease with which British ships in Balaclava harbour, could be set on fire. "I would like to ask," said Lord Raglan, "whether the paid agent of the Emperor, of Russia could better serve his master than does the correspondent of the paper that has the largest circulation in Europe." lan Hamilton, we are being told, was never seen among his fighting men; the same thing was falsely said of Lord Raglan, who, as a matter of fact, during the bitter winter of jihe 3iege was riding about amongst his divisional oamps and his hospitals almost daily. W. H. Russell was the Ashmead-Bartlett of the Crimea, only more.so. Of course we muddled through; but it was a sanguinary muddling and unduly protracted,—thanks to the rage for publicity and the fatal impulse to blab. It was what the French call a "success de scandale " —a success because a scandal —that Captain Simson achieved by his anti-racing speech from the grand stand of the Riccarton racecourse. He was out to make a scandal, and he made it. Good man! A scandal "was wanted. It is useless tirading from a soap box in Cathedral square;— Captain Simson knew a trick worth two of that. Spoken from the coign of vantage to which the Riccarton stewards in their simplicity had elevated him, his words were very spears and arrows. " You are racing here to-day, and the whole Empire is at the point of a crisis. . . . You cannot expect the men in this crowd to think seriously of the war while you hold race meetings." " Call yourselves men?" —he shouted to the gaping mob below: —" You have ignored the appeal of your King—every appeal, from the press, from Parliament, from your dead and wounded countrymen. ... I say evei7 one of you fit for fight is an absolute shirker, —yon are absolutely indifferent, callous rotters." Then to.the < women beside him, right and left, in their < Cup Day bedizenments, he spake a word 1 that might have come from the Hebrew prophets. It wasn't the men they had brought with them, the men in mufti, who would protect them from outrage. In that day they would want the men in tiniform. "Rise up, ye women, that are at ease"—he seemed to say: "Hear my voice, ye careless daughters; give ear unto my speech. ..." In that day shall be taken away the bravery of your tinkling ornaments, the cresccnts, and the pendants,—the chains, the bracelets, the sashes, the head-tiros, the earrings, the festival robes, the v mantles, the wimples, the crisping pins, s the perfume boxes, the fine linen, the hoods,,and the vails. And it shall come to pass that instead of a sweet smell there shall be a etink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness, and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth, and burning instead of beauty. That was the spirit of it. And here endeth the first lesson. It adds a sting that Captain Simson is himself no Puritan, but in his own. country J a steward of racing clubs and chairman of a an Owners and / Breeders' Association. ? Moreover, he can show a presentation cu.p received from the Sultan of Egypt " as a j souvenir of the interest he had taken in racing" while sojourning within, that p potentate's domain. But there is a time for everything. It is not the time for jinks and junketing when you have a death in the house. -There is another uncomfortable fact—a 'net which on the racing question puts the Christchurch people egregiously in the wrong. The Lyttelton Times, Monday, makes the totalisator figures for the Riccarton week to be " over £300,000 " has to lament that subscriptions to the Patriotic Fund stiok at £30,000, and get no forrarder. An infamous contrast. J0 There are interests and Individuals in this province that have received profits jj out of the; war beyond tho wildest jj anticipations, and if a fair_ proportion w had been subscribed to patriotic objects j; the givers would still have remained immensely enriched as a direct result of the Empire's trouble. However, to mend matters—says the same paper—the Christchurch people are now about to run a Queen's Carnival, and alongside of a Queen's Carnival a King's Carnival, bettering our example and P doubling the joy. With Riccarton racecourse excitements possessing the streets and brought home to every man's door, so V( to speak, dwellers in the City of the Plain tl may look forward to "the time of their ta Itms." U

"Conscription of wealth is what we want, say the anti-conscriptionists,—not the conscription of men. Well, we have the. conscription of wealth. What .s r the income tax? The Government knows e the income of every man in the country 6 who ctm be taxed for income. It knows, or is able to know if it choo&es, who the r men are that—.in'the words of the Lyttel- " ton Times—'have been "immensely enE riched as a direct result of the Empire's 3 trouble," and exactly how much they have t been enriched. The income tax returns ■ show all this. Then why doesn't the ' Government do its duty? This conundrum J is quite beyond my guessing; I give it up • Our sick and wounded in England are I allowed after leaving hospital 2s a day each ! man—" hardly sufficient to meet bus ex- • pendittwe." How are they to live? They 1 are to live on charity. The Minister of 3 Defence, Mr Allen, announces that " for 1 that purpose " —the purpose of keeping • them alive—he "has ih> funds in hand," i and "invites the ptublic to subscribe." See a - consequent subscription list in the columns s of the Daily Times. The Minister for i Internal Affairs, Mr Russell, for his part, s has proposed " a great national art union t of pictures in aid of the sick and - wounded," but is doubtful how far this s statesmanlike device will find acceptance, i Opportunely chips in the Y.M.C.A. —to Mr Russell's great comfort. The Y.M.C.A. ' is providing funds, and Mr Russell thinks i "it would be an excellent idea" if the I It .M.C.A. could persuade the churches to do likewise. After which we shall come down to Sunday schools and kindergartens. ' It is a marvel that Minister's are able to • look the country in the face, A German ; " Kladderadatsch " or " Fliegende Blatter " b —Teutonic approaches to Punch—would t depict the Hon. Russell with barrel organ • and monkey, and the Hon. Allen with tambourine collecting coppers. Compared with many things that the • German papers do actually say about us, that would be a modest and truthful Tepre- ! sentation. The following sketch of English recruiting methods has vastly less veril similitude. It is from the Vossische Zeitung—" Pictures from London ":— A poverty-stricken quarter where vice and misery grin at one another. /There is a recruiting station, and newly%aked soldiers are grouped around it. From a side street the sounds of a cornet, out of tune, patriotic, sentimental. Probably a blind man playing for coppers. No, it . is the English method of recruiting. The musician plays " God save the King," and his companion mounts a step-ladder and harangues the crowd about mutilated children, violated women, and old men burnt to death; also about England's glory. The cornet' man. then plays " Kathleen Mavourneen" or "Home, sweet home"; men hurry past as though afraid of being caught in the net, and women gossip about the dear times. People in the greengrocer's shop grin, and the butcher busies himself with the carcase of a horse. In the distance, coming nearer, a fife and drum band. " They're always the same lot," says a woman with a horseflesh beefsteak under her arm. The woman is right. It is a crowd of stage figures, delirious drunkards, fished out of the streets and led about like tame bears. The impression is sought to be given that these fellows are recruits from pur© ■ patriotism. They are marching about in their own rags. The crowd indulges in noise and laughtor, the man With the ' cornet plays " Tipperary," the man on the step-ladder bawls to the playing children, and the ladies continue their talk about the deamces of things. The Rev. C. J. Bush-King, chaplain on furlough from the war region, elucidates some mysteries due to defective imagination on our part,—the regrettable uncertainty of Galhpoli postal arrangements, for example. There were enemy guns, he said, and enemy submarines; there was mail matter that went to the bottom of the sea. The main thing was to remember that we were at war. Yes, —thanks; I feel with Captain Simson that but for the headlines in the newspapers many of us would forget it. The conditions at the front were conditions of warfare. If some lad managed to borrow the lid of a matchbox and scratch a_ few lines upon it, hand it to a. chaplain, and so get a message to his home, let the parents of that lad be thankful. Mr Bush-King's return may remind us that our, chaplains have a good record. More than one of them has figured in the casualty list. According to the Re>v. R. J. Campbell, who in Flanders has ..been to see for himself, sectarian different j readily adjust themselves under *ur-. fiiv Notice-board at the front: —" S: " day, 8 a.m., Holy Communion, Ch.ii':- i of England; 10 a.m., Mass, Roman Catholic; 11.30 a.m., Nonconformist, preaching service." On the Saturday evening there had probably been a service for Jews, within the same walls. The Communion table served alike for the Roman Catholic and the Anglican. In the former case the priests brought their own candles. The men themselves are of an accommodating catholicity. Here is an old-time story by Field-marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. When I went to Aldershot in 1867, Sunday was a show day in stables, which gave rise to a Horse Artillery man's curious request. A young soldier going up to his commanding officer, said, "Please, sir, I want to change my religion." "What's up? What do you want to be?". "I want to be a Roman Catholic." "Priest been ;it you?" "No, sir; no priest" "Woman?" "No, sir." "Well, I shall not allow you to change your religion." " Please, sir, any man may be any religion he likes in the army." " Yes, but I have got you noted as being a Church of England man, and I don't mean to allow you to change your religion without giving me some reason." The man then admitted his real object. "Well, you see, sir, a Roman Catholic goes to church at eight o'clock, and I think if I was a Roman it would give me a better chance my 'amess." One story brings in another. This is from Sfr R. Baden-Powell's Tecent volume of "Reminiscences." There were no parsons in Afghanistan, and divine service used" to be taken by the colonel. One day, when he began with his enormous voice, the mules in the baggage lines all started whinnying, thinking he must be giving the order to feed. So he broke off in the middle of " Dearly beloved brethren," and shouted out: " Fall out a corporal from each troop and go and stop those mules making that damned noise!" We make better provision nowadays; of which fact Mr Bnsh-King in his own person is a living witness. Civis.