PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3280, 24 January 1917, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

CFrom Saturday's Daily Times.) With the passing of January, now drawing to its end, will pas;; the worst of the Northern winter, thanks be. "There is neither clock nor calendar in the British Army to-day," says Mr Lloyd George; " only the result counts, not the time consumed in achieving it." And a good February—sun and frost in exchange for rain and mud —will shorten the time and hasten achievement. Every bright day is a gift to the armies of Haig and Nivelle, bringing nearer their heart's desire. No men on earth have a prouder record; Verdun is the glorv of the one, the Sommo of both. In the "British lines the "Old Contemptibles" who made the Retreat from Mons and victoriously rounded upon the enemy at the Marne are able to see that the Young Hopefuls of " Kitchener's Mob" and of the overseas, contingents are just as good. Theirs is the Battle of the iSomme, the -scale of which we have never realised; imagination halts. The Spectator," November 18, touches thus on one part of it only : Tiio week has soon a great battle and a great victory, one on so large a scale that, did not the intricacies of trench warfare perplex the mind and distract the judgment, it would be regarded as one of the greatest in our military annals. As has been wittily and wisely said, we storm Badajos at the rate of about once a week, and naturally therefore do not think much about it. That is, indeed, short of the truth, because our Badajoees are on a scale ten times greater than the original. The Breach at Badajos has hitherto been the classical example of British pluck and staying power. Yet the Somme surpasses Badajos as Badajos the Battle of Vinegar Hill. Mr Winston Churchill does not always weigh his words; but he has both weighed and measured them when he characterises the Somme as " this most wonderful and terrible manifestation of human valour." It's a long way to Tipperary, and a roundabout way. One loop of it seems to coincide with the desert wanderings of the Children of Israel. After Samoa, and

New Guinea, and Kiao-chao; after Africa .East, West, North, and South; alter Mesopotamia, the Plains pi Troy, the Isles of Greece, the Dardanelles, and ; Salonika; after France and Belgium, from i of old the Cockpit of Europe; we are now come to the South of Palestine, and a I New Zealand Mounted Corps has been : doing good work in or near the Wilder- | ness of Zin. Close at hand is Gaza, from i which town Samson carried off the gates; : Beersheba and Jericho are not far away ; and a French war critic is anticipating our 1 capture of Jerusalem. El Arish and Rafa, on the desert side of the frontier, we have already captured with booty of prisoners and guns. A hundred years ago or more —in 1799, to be exact —General Bonaparte passed this way. At the head of 12,000 men he was on his road from ! Egypt to Constantinople and the Empire | of the East. February 20 took El Arish ; I March 5 the town and port of Jaffa, | whence to-day runs the railway to • Jerusalem. The distances were short and I he was travelling light, after El Arish i living on the country. Whereby it befell ! that at Jaffa he shot his El Arish prisoners, 2COO or more, unable either to feed or guard and afraid to let them go. A bad blot, that. March 18 (note the succession of dates) he was at Acre, | where he. encountered Admiral Sir Sidney | Smith, the man who changed his destiny, as he said at St Helena. Kailing to carry I Acre, the prospective Emperor of the i Glittering East abandoned his guns and | made a sorry retreat the way he had ! come—down the coast, through the desert, ; and so to Egypt, whence he got himself smuggled across to France, there to become in rapid course the Napoleon of history and the Emperor of the West. Now the Bay of Acre, which marks the I turning point of Napoleon's destiny, and I which he reached in 26 days from El Arish ! (February 20 to March 18) marching and lighting, lies folded in the embrace of the Peninsula of Carmel. Near one of the spurs of Carmel (according to the pundits) is the geographical Armageddon. Fact! Where the apocalyptic Armageddon may be this deponent sayeth not. Probably in the same place. The significant thing is that at this moment British troops are heading straight for Armageddon. With luck they might get there from El Arish in three' weeks. If they wished to lake Jerusalem on their way, making a detour to tiie eastward by the Jaffa railway (Cook's tickets used to be available), we should allow them longer. Be that as it may, the fact remains that for the first time in the course of this world-embracing war of nations the field of Armageddon comes into view. Armies British and Turk may meet there, the Cross and the Crescent in final conflict. But this subject lies beyond my sphere. I remit it to the students of prophecy. Last week I cited the Rev. R. J. i Campbell, formerly of the City Temple, j as authority for the statement that British | soldiers found in Prussian trenches they had taken French and Belgian women and girls, stark naked, tied to posts, for their swinish captors io abuse as they pleased. A correspondent objects that this is mere hearsay—Mr Campbell did not see the thing himself, but was told it by others. Outrages reported by the Bryce Committee and by the French Commission are in the same category; —■ •" not scientifically proved " .-aid the I British pro-Germans, the Snowdens and Ramsay Macdonalds. " Not scientifically proved " sounds well and is a phrase ot wide application. The beheading of . Charles I is not scientifically proved, nor ' the death of Queen Anno, nor the Battle : of Waterloo. It is a genera! belief that Columbus discovered America, that the i earth is a globe, and that the moon is ■ not made of green cheese; but there is 1 a wide gap between general belief and : scientific proof. In renun natural from end to end nothing is capable of scientific proof but that the three angles of a I triangle are equal to two right angle.-, that the angles at the base of an equal-

' sided triangle are equal, and that in a /ight-angled triangle the square on the. longest side is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides, —these fact 3, together with others of a like cheerful and stimulating nature, arc scientifically proved. Assurance of other facts derives from sight and sound and touch ; and nothing is more pertain than that sight and sound and touch, one and all, may deceive. If German crime cannot be proved by the methods of an examiner in Euclid and to the satisfaction of the Snowdens and the Ramsay we have nevertheless enough proof to go upon. Major Stewart in his book " From Mods to Loos " tells that "a British officer saw the Germans collect the British wounded, place them between two traverses of a trench, and bomb them there to death." Hearsay again : but this hearsay is corroborated by the systematic murder of British prisoners at Wittenberg, at Ruhleben, and elsewhere. "A premeditated policy of slow murder," writes one of its victims, a French army surgeon, from Gastrow camp. In another war book, "The Retreat from Mons, By One Who Shared In It," Major L'orbett-Smith sav . s : —'• J recall a remark made to me by a Prussian naval officer during the South African war: 'You English do not know the rudiments of war. When the day comes for us to go to war you shall see how we, with whom terror is the greatest weapon, deal with men, women, and children.' " And Major L'orbettSmith saw it. Hanging up in the open window of a shop, strung from a hook in a crossbeam, like a joint in a butcher's shop, was the body a little girl of live, its. poor little hands hacked oft and its , body pierced with vicious bayonet stabs. " Hunnish " as an epithet for crime in this degree is unfair to the Hun ; "devilish" is unfair to the Devil. i'hc prince of darkness is a gentleman, and that the Teuton torturer of women and children never was. Say rather a gorilla. The miscreants who do these things should be hanged as high as Haman, says the National Review. Right,—and let all the people say Amen! We cannot hang the whole German.nation; it will suffice to deal with its leaders caught redhanded. Yet the whole German nation shares the crime. Gone are the old days of philosophy and literature, of music and song, of festal gatherings, of the Annas and the Gretchcns, of pleasant trout streams and silent forests, and of the other things that once made Germany beloved; The Prussian drillmaster, historian, scientist, and schoolmaster have by their united efforts distorted the old German mind and have made this modern monstrosity: the Boehe —half-beast, half fiend. If the Germans of to-day are as bad as we know them, the Germans of yesterday could not have been as good as we thought them. Nemo repente turpissimus. Nor as wise. The greatest name in German literature is, I suppose, that of Goethe. Let me take courage to say that Goethe's "Faust"—his magnum opus —is a commonplace seduction of the " pretty milliner," a girl in her teens; round which choice theme is wound much foggy philosophy, much beery sentiment, introduced by a " Prologue in Heaven" parodied from the Book of Job ; wherein it appears that the prince of darkness, German version, is not at all a gentleman. " I like to see the Old Un occasionally," he says, " and take care not to break with him. It is very civil in so great a Kerr to talk so kindly with the Devil himself." The best to be said of Goethe's "Faust" h that it is made endurable bv Gounod's music." Then there is " Wilhelm Meister." By way of giving German literature a lift Carl vie translated " Wilhelm Meister " into "English. "No mortal will ever buy a copy of it," he said. ''Goethe is the greatest genius that has lived for a century, and the greatest ass that has lived for" three." Whoever in these serious limes would afford himself an hour's fun. riotous and rollicking, let him read De Quincey's review. Dear " Civis,"- Amongst our soldiers, and amongst civilians, te.o, a subject of discussion is the free familiarity between the officers and the rank and file of the overseas contingents as compared with the Imperial—that is, the Home troops.. Her;: is a story that is going the rounds. The subject cropped up in the talk of a group of officers —Imperial and overseas, amongst whom was General Birdwood, in charge of the Australian Contingents. Says one Imperial officer in a haw-haw maimer: "1 cat: never understand, Birdwocd, why you allow such freedom to your nun. Familiarity is not conducive to discipline."' Birdwood retorted by relating an incident which happened "somewhere in France." One day ho was inspecting the lines, well io tlie rear, when he heard a voice veiling out: "Duck vour bloody head, Birdy; duck your bloody head!" The Imperial man's breath was taken awav. Tic gasped : " And what did von do?" "Ducked my bloody head like a sensible man. If I hadn't, 1 mightn't have had i a head left to eluck."

General Birdwood, being a popular officer, may be " Birdy," a;; Napoleon for a like reason was the *' Little Corporal," and Wellington was " that long nosed beggar," or " Nosey" for short. Popu» larity with rank and file is apt to take r» form of this kind. To suppose that an officer of the regular army is held a morq sacred person than his colleague from seas is a mistake. Read Kipling's piece, " With the Main Guard." A company of the Black Tyrone under " a littla orf'cer bhoy " (seniors being scarce) anct a company of Mulvanoy's regiment under a Major O'Neil (otherwise Old Crook) had, spent a profitable hour' with a " Faythan Reserve " —so called, being one of tha North-West Province hill tribes in revolt. Now listen—Mulvaney loquitur: We wore a. gang tiv dissolute ruffians, for tho blood had oaken the dust, 'an tho sweat had cut tho cake, 'an our bay'nitos w.is hangin' iiko butchers' steels bctune ur legs, an' most av us wore marked oik 1 waj or another. A Staff Orf'cer man, clep.n as a new riilo, rides up an' scz: "What damned scarecrows are you?" " A company av her Majesty's Black Tyrone, an' wan av iho Ould Rig'mint," sea Crook very quiet. "Oh!" soz 'tho Staff Orf'cer; "did you dislodge that Reserve?" " Xo!" soz Crook, an' tho fTyrona laughed. \ "Thin fwhat tho divil have ye done?" " Disthroycd ut," soz Crook, an' ho took os or., but not before Toonv-y, that was in the Tyrone, soz aloud, his voice somewhere in his stummick: ''Fwhat in Iho name av misfortune docs this parrit widout a iail mane by shtoppin' tho road av his betthers?" " The Staff Orf'cer wint blue,"—and went still bluer when the rank-and-file proceeding added a piquant detail or two—* unrebuked. Whilst destroying the Pavthans aa aforesaid, at the very height of that gory; business, Mulvaney had discerned a> ,-:er< r eant of the Tyrone holding down his commanding onieer, silting on him in fact, ■' Fwhat have yon got there?" scz I to the Saxgint. " Wan of her Majesty's bantams wid his spurs up," soy. he. "He's goin' to Coort-martial me." •'Let me go!"' soz the little orf'cer boy. "Lot mo go an' command my men!" manin' thereby tin; Black Tyrone, which was beyond any oommanday, ovrn av they had made the divil Fiekl-orfcer. " [lis father howlds my mothers cowfood in Clonmel," soz iho man that was Gttin' on him "Will ! go back to his mother an' toll her that I've lot him throw himself away? bio s til!, ye little pinch of dynamite, an' Coort-martiaJ mo aftherwards." "I'm a dishyracod man!" soz tho little orf'cer boy. " Put ui" nndher arrest, Sorr, if you will. but. by my. sow!, I'd do ur_ again . sooner than" face your mother wid you dead," scz the Sargint that had sat on his head, standin' to attention an' salutin'. "There's a dale more done in the field than iver gets into Field Ordhers," remarks the sage Mulvaney, summing up, Civis.