PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25238, 29 May 1943, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

Naturally enough, the spectacular outcome of the Tunisian campaign has sent our minds scouring for parallels. The search need not be long, for vast armies on the modern scale belong only to recent decades. It may justly be claimed that the Axis Tunisian surrender, in men and material, is the greatest single disaster suffered by any army, in field or fortress, not only in this war, but in any other._ The last war had nothing like it if we reckon single occasions. In the present war even the surrender of Stalingrad is outdone; for, though vastly more Axis troops were launched at that single objective and were caught in that single" trap, the remnant that capitulated under von Paulus were fewer in number than the 200,000 and more who surrendered under yon Arnim. At Dunkirk over 350,000 Allied troops were safely evacuated. The crowning disaster to French arms at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was the catastrophe of Sedan, where Napoleon 111 surrendered with 39 generals and 80,000 men. The capitulation at Metz of Marshal MacMahon and 175,000 men followed two months later. Though the surrender at Metz was numerically the greater of the 'two, it has been’Sedan rather than Metz that Frenchmen of a whSle generation have placed beside Waterloo as a symbol of catastrophe, and as a disaster that called for revenge.

Discussions on the utility of corporal punishment in the education of boys are as old as education itself. Diogenes expressed his views significantly in his words: “When a boy swears, I strike the father.” Which means that when parents make their complaints they should approach the subject humbly, and with a shamefaced sense of a duty left undone. In modern times more noise seems to be made about corporal punishment in schools than is produced by it at the time, or heard after it. In fact, an interesting feature of this striking and impressive aid to instruction is the . equanimity with which it is given and received by those immediately concerned with it. A good pedagogic method it was in days gone by, regarded as the real royal road to learning, doing its share in the building uin of individual and national character. And men have made for themselves .a great name by it. / “Flagosus Orbillds” has,become famous by his flogging of Horace. His fellow townsmen were proua of Orbilius, and raised a statue to his memory. The famous Dr Busby flogged for 60 years in \yestminster School, and produced thereby many Dryderis, Loclces, Atterbys, and Matthew Priors. Eton and Harrow have in modern times flogged all the noblemen of England.

Ancj, what about caning by prefects? The rights or wrongs of corporal punishment by masters depend beyond doubt on the right or wrong choosing of.masters On the right or wrong choosing of prefects depend the rights or wrongs of caning by prefects. The highest recommendation of a master is that “he knows boys.” Who should know boys better than a good prefect? .Especially should he know modern boys. No good prefect is taken in by the guiles and wiles of a delinquent boy which may play ducks and drakes with a master who “doesn’t know boys/’ In a prefect’s hands corporal punishment is not a mere pedagogic method, for what has a prefect to do with pedagogics? His concern is with “ behaviour,” and his method of punishment may be supremely efficient. Stories are told of the methods by which prefects of the Otago Boys’ High School of hajf-a-century ago dealt with “delinquents" better than a master could do. A boy 6nce found guilty of stealing from another boy’s desk was well-soused under the'&chool water tap, clothes and all. A jury of his fellows—“all good boys and true”—had convicted him, and they washed his sin away. Before the whole school, too. Of the same school in those days it is reported that “ducking” was the corrective administered to a “ swot ” that is, a boy 'who studied with unseemly energy and concentration, and did nothing, else.; /

But prefects are not perfect. At times they may put the telescope of their allotted office to the blind, eye of their liking for fun. Not mentioned in any. Official History of the Otago Boys’ High School is the “Tale of the Bearded Brothers”; but it is true all the same. To the school one day came two new boys—brothers. Just normal boys they were, rather solemn, older and bigger than most, and sturdily built. They came wearing beards! Now, moustaches on Sixth Form boys were in those days, it is said, not unknown. They were admired, and therefore, on a senior boy, fully tolerated. But beards! A new boy in any school is .suspect for a time, but a new boy with a beard is as sinister as a Mephistopheles. By all the school Common Law the beard was a “ delinquency.” Appeals : to the bearded brother all proved vain. The bulldog breed in them refused to budge a hair’s breadth to part from their cherished heirlooms. The hair on their heads was neither here nor there, and, for all they-cared, might be anywhere. But their beards were matters of conscience. In the violent combat that followed against formidable odds, the Brothers furiously refused to be forcibly shaved. They fetained their courage and their beards to the end, and they won out. 1

Why do American soldiers and sailors so dislike New Zealand lamb that they cannot be 'induced to eat it? A host of similar unanswered and probably unanswerable questions revolves round the question of diet, both individual and national. In this Ame'rican distaste for New Zealand lamb is the emphasis laid on “ lamb ” or on “New Zealand.” That is, is our cooking at fault? Yet Americans eulogise our New Zealand : beef. Is their dislike of lamb physiological or psychological? Does this American dislike of New Zealand lamb extend also to New Zealand mutton? And is it environmental? In the American wild west days' nesters and rustlers, Texas Rangers and two-gun outlaws, when the cowman and his cowboys were the aristocrats of the unfenced ranges, and the sheep herder the scum of the earth, the cow was a lordly animal and the sheep and its mutton were just vermin. But environment works in the opposite direction with the New Zealand sheep farmer and his shearers. Surrounded, day in, day out, by a mutton environment, they prefer beef. And a rabbiter abhors rabbit. Why, again, does the Frenchman prefer meat boiled, the Englishman beef roasted? Why do so many fruit farmers never eat peaches, and fruit-picking boys, after the first week or two, never eat them—or almost never?

All languages are full <, of untranslatable idioms— especially English, and more especially still, American. In English alone there are idioms .of sport that should make the stoutest foreign heart quail. What is a foreigner to make of a report of a football match at Carisbrook? _ From it he would learn that a “point” is a good thing to get, but a“pointer’ is not the man who scores it; that the right way to “ collar ” a player is not round the neck, where the collar usually is, but low, round the knees, where there is not even a garter; that an “ umpire ” does not “ umpire ” and a “ referee ” is not merely a man to whom one “refers”; that the player who “ tries ” does not always score a “ try,” nor does he who scores a mark make any “ mark ” at all; and that on any muddy day at Carisbrook a ■player could show “a clean pair of heels.” Just as bad is it in other branches of sport. A golfer who “ holes out ” merely “ holes in ”; he may “ drive off” when he is “off his. drive”; and that the only “ hole ” to be seen in “ the nineteenth hole ” is his own mouth. Likewise in wider realms of sport. Civis ’