PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3278, 10 January 1917, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.) The reply of the Allies to the German peace manoeuvres, —in reality a war manoeuvre, as they had the intelligence to discern —opens the New Year, and of Armageddon the final iniase. The final phase,—of that belief nothing but events can despoil us. Even the Germans recognise in 1917 the German " year of fate. ' We are not forgetting that events, though strictly related to causes, seem sometimes tricky. Rumania came to Germany as an uncovenauted mercy, a boon the Germans had no reason to expect. Scant of guns, scant of help from her new allies, Russian auxiliaries far away, Rumania was recognised at once as " a soft thing," and has been dealt with accordingly. But the Rumanian iiascc—which is not altogether a fiasco, not yet —leaves the main situation unchanged. The Allies are steadfast to their purpose, and to each other. In that fact lies Germany's doom. They have cogent motives to be steadfast. With them it is now or never. Now or never will France recover the Rhine provinces; now or never will Russia set the cross above the crescent on St. Sophia at Constantinople. For neither France nor Russia will the chance return. As for Belgium and Serbia, a drowning sailor could not cling to a hencoop with closer devotion than these unfortunates to the cause of the Allies.

Then there is our own position. In August Mr Masse was writing in his National Review: When our Jellicoes and Bcattys, our Robertsons and Haiga have done their work our affairs will relapse into the hands of the Greys, the Crewes, and the Asquiths, with Lord Haldane in the background or as amicus curiae. Will any man or woman daro to come forward and say over their own signature that they are elated by this prospect nnd would feel comfortable under the auspices of such resolute, resourceful, determined men? Lest the irony of the adjectives be missed I quote again : Sir Edward Grey was mado a complete fool of by the enemy before the war 'r^7: l : A.r. ll .V l . ll MMi. l M l ii l .ii. l i. l iiiiii.iiiri M ilni.

any negotiations, nor is tlioro any one with authority to keep him straight. When ho retires from Downing Street on the summons of the dry fly, his place is taken by another K.G., 'the Most Honourable) the Marquess of Crewe." Will it bo seriously contended that K.G. No. 2 is more competent than K.G. No. 1 to confront Pan-Germans in Council'!' If stupid in some things the German superman is a past master in the art of bluffing, compared with whom the Americans are children. Our Ministers, on the other hand, are past masters in the art of being bluffed and blackmailed. Since August we have changed all that. Bunglers and blunderers no longer rule over us. The Ministerial blazon has ceased to be " Wait and see." If we have heard nothing from Lloyd George for the last ten days, it is not that ho is letting the grass grow under his feet. The less heard the more doing, belike. Put it as you will, the New Year omens and auspices are good, and we are out to improve them. Now or never I There is a tide in the affairs of men Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. Let us not be ashamed to repeat the hackneyed words. For no occasion, crisis. exigency greater than ours could they have been written.

Desperation will now be the mood of Germany, desperate deeds the German programme, resumes from January the Ist, On that date go into commission in countless swarm new and bigger submarines, sharp at the bow _to cut through tangling nets and restraining hawsers. clippers sticking out in front and operated from the engine room have not yet been mentioned. Wait and see! On land, Hindenburg coming west is to " cleave his way to Calais; before or after which he will take in hand Verdun and show how fields are won. There is more in this than talk. It is not all Rawhead and Bloody Bones for the frightening of children. Nor is its purpose merely to " buck up" the German people. Before German ambition is overthrown German

violence will do its worst. The Bosche at bay is a cornered rat, and a cornered rat sticks at nothing. We may have to meet attempts the wildest. A few weeks back, on October 27 to be exact, ten German destroyers from Zeebrugge or Ostcnd, a two hours' run, made a midnight attack on our cross-Channel transport service. Two of them were sunk, also two of ours, with an empty transport to boot. A few days later Lord French, reviewing 6000 Volunteers at Derby, spoke in this fashion : The possibility of invasion, 'ho said, was remote, but how did they know that there was not something- behind the ' naval raid, and that there was not a fleet of enemy transports in readiness to .come out? 110 did not say that it was likely but he desired to impress upon them that it was absolutely possible. Unexpected things happened in war, and they could only bo prepared by being properly armed and equipped. The idea that at this stage an invasion is possible, and might be heralded by a midnight rush of destroyers, seems intrinsically absurd. And yet it is the idea of Lord French.

An Australian lady fresh from Germany, —how she got out is not in the story,— has been talking to the Argus on a wellworn theme—" the different spirit in which the two peoples, German and British, took the war." The Germans took it in grim and deadly earnest from the first. Kings and Governments economised as well as their subjects; there was none of tho "business as usual" cry. Wo read in the English papers of dances and dinners, but such things ceased to bo in Germany. There were no men left to dance, and no one would have thought of eating big public dinners. Rich people's servants went to the front, and so did their horses, and every ono settled down to a life of tho simplest character. Some people—armament firms, for instance —made a lot of money out of the war, she says, and " felt they must spend it somehow;" —bought pictures, perhaps. A Berlin artist reports the war years as his best years. But on tho whole Germany from tho beginning faced tho stern realities of war in a spirit which was long in being: roused in Britain. They are awake in Britain now; I am not sure about Australia.. No; —nor can anybody bo sure about New Zealand. Tho kindly Zeppelins have helped to wake up people in tho mother land; — first tho baby-killing raids on Fast Coast watering places, next the Zeppelins Casualty lists alonß would not have .done it. A million deaths wowld bo little more than 2 per cent, of the population,— barely perceptible. But darkness in city streets is perceptible, not to mention other

has come compulsory national service. The first feeling was that this war, like all its predecessors, was external to the national life, an affair of the army, —the army itself being a thing apart, a profession, mainly godless and to be avoided, altogether alien in spirit and morals from middle-class smugness, and from religion as understood by the evangelic sects. Compulsion is curing all that. Compulsion, if we had begun with it, would have given us not only the men wherewith to win the war in short order, but the spirit. Even now there are signs of incomplete perception; we are still (to borrow Wordsworth) " moving about in worlds not realised," or we should not tolerate the ultra-patriotic Daily Mail in explaining to our enemies, to Greeks, Bulgars, and Turks in particular, the uselessness of our Salonika army, its strategic disadvantages, and the impossibility of its ever doing any good. The Daily Mail means well, and so possibly did Judas Iscariot. If my memory serves, it is argued by D& Quincey that Judas was a well-intentioned friend who merely wanted to hasten matters. Which formula would equally cover the Daily Mail.

That the tM-enty-ninth month of the war finds New Zealand imperfectly awake may be inferred from a fact emphasised this week by the Daily Times—that for eight consecutive davs following Boxing Day we put more than £IOO,OOO a day through the totalisator. This is mere damnation. We may say, of course, that, in putting money "through the totalisator Ave 'only shuffle it from pocket to pocket; nothing is lost, not even the Government tax. Which is true; —along with the spirit of frivolity and the greed of grab, its concomitants, the totalisator money is " still there." Not so the money spent in racing stables, in railway trains on the 300_ and odd racing days in the year, in feminine bedizenments for the grand stand. Money spent in these things is money burned. Well, we can afford it, says somebody,— meaning that we have got the money to burn. We have,—*nd thereby hangs a tale. Look on this picture and on that—the money the war has given us, and the money wo have giVen to the war. Do we perceive a proportion consistent with selfrespect? Our patriotic funds, of which we are proud, won't save us. The Dunedin Queen Carnival was a prolonged revel, —the same in Christchurch, the same in Auckland. For every pound wo put into it we took twenty shillings' worth of fun out of it; the winners of lottery prizes took more. These things- being so, it seems a pity that the Zeppelin range is narrow. Perhaps, however, there is hope in the submarine. This exponent of kultur has already crossed the Atlantic and may yet be found patrolling the Australasian coasts and the Tasman Sea.

General Birdwood addressing his Australians, (Daily Times, Thursday) says that there is " only one good German, namely a dead one;"' and that for promoting Germans to goodness the Australian trench warrior needs three things. — A clean rifle and a sharp bayonet, A good pair of boot 3, and A full stomach. He added a fourth in supplement of the good pair of boots —a dry pair of stockings. We have arranged that every man shall have three pairs of socks, and that every morning a dry pair of socks shall be sent up to the trenches, the wet pair being sent back to be washed and dried." Admirable. Their own mothers couldn't contrive it better. Clear it is that General Birdwood both fathers and molhers his men, and for such a commander it is that men will go anywhere and do anything. Life in the trenches it not agreeable is at least endurable. And there are distractions. An Otago boy writes to a friend in Dunedin: —" We are right in the thick of it now. . . G and I brought in three Boaches yesterday. It was hardly worth the trouble. All I got was a pocket-knife 1" But a Bosche pocket-knife is something when the prize of your own bow and spear. Butting things together, cno can understand the feeling of the British soldier who happened to be visiting the Fleet on leave when the call came to the Battle of Jutland; said he afterward: " Ko more naval battles for me, thank you : I would rather do five years in the trenches!'' "About onions "■—begins a correspondent, and is at once put at tho bottom, lest lie infect the whole column: About onions,—did you notice in tho English news that a Lincolnshire farmer laid down 3C<3 acres in onions this year, and sold the crop for £2O,OCQ? Is it credible? There can't be as much in onions as all that. How many tons of onions to an acre, I wonder, and what do onions fetch a ton? This catechism floors me outright. I am not an onion expert, don't grow that vegetable—or "that fruit" as a tramp skipper denominates it with enthusiasm in ono of Mr Cutliffe Hyne's books; nor have I ever bought onions by the ton. Perhapa there is no reason in the nature of tilings why onions should not be accumulated in tons, and pyramids, and mountains, —which is an appalling thought. Recently the French .*„, L r i--v- %t:ii. °j- tt '- : 1 HflO

tons of Spanish onions from Gandia, Spain, to New York. " Tho odour from the forohold was so powerful that tho crew in tho forecastle were in tears all tha voyage and were forced to sleep on deck." Old Jules Bibot, tho quartermaster, adds the New York Times, declared that when ho went clown into the forehold to got up a coil of rope, he saw hundreds of rats sitting in a circle around tho sacks of onions, wiping tho tears from their beady black eyes with their paws, which was quito pathetic, old vTules said. Quito so. And inherently credible. If tha Lincolnshire farmer and his £20,000 crop may be accepted there is more in the onion than meets tho eye. Civis.