PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3353, 19 June 1918, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

CFrom Saturday's Daily Timca.) Slow, but deadly sure, seems the German advance towards Paris. Only forty miles to go, or thereabout, the distance, say, from Palmcrston or Milton to Dunedin. Yet the tone of the cables is that they will never get there. The tone of the French is that they will never get there. Paris, in the cables, is "an optimistic city." To the Parisians it is unthinkable that the Prussian eagle should perch on their Arc de Triomph to flap his obscene wings,—unthinkable because they refuse to think it; which' is a very fine spirit. At this distance, speaking for one, I do not find the capture of Paris unthinkable. Twice within living memory has Paris suffered siege and capture ;• first by the Germans, next by the French themselves. The French themselves had to recover their capital from the Communards—the Bolshevists of that day,— who in sheer devilry had laid the best part of it in ruins. These things passed and left no trace. Cities great and old have a reason of being, a reason of being just where they are and nowhere else, that makes them imperishable. Destroy them, and they rise anew from their ashes. Twenty years hence Paris will be Paris, whatever happens to-day. But what has happened in the past may happen again.

Siege and capture would seem to be the common lot of capital cities ; they all suffer it in turn. London alone excepted : Which never did, nor never shall, Lie at tho proud foot of a conqueror. In 1848 —when the French abolished monarchy and set up a republic, not knowing that three years later they would be the subjects of an emperor—in 1848 there was a question of the national flag.— should it be the Napoleonic tricolor, or should it be the revolutionary drapeau rouge? Said Lamartine, addressing the people from the Hotel de Ville : "Tho tricolor has made the round of tho capitals of Europe; the drapeau rouge has made the round of the Champ de Mars!" That settled it. The tricolor is to-day the proud flag of France; the drapeau rouge —sunk to' be the symbol of class hatred—■ is the "Red besung of mutinous strikers, of New Zealand Ked Feds, and

of Maorilander Holland, M.P. for Grey. Let us not speak of it, but look, and Eass. About Lamartine's boast there can e no debate. Counting in Moscow (for* Russia) and leaving out London, the tricolor had been carried in triumph through the streets of every capital in Europe. The future? —that is a long word. All tho time that is belongs to tho future. Berlin may yet be reminded that capital cities are not immune. from capture. Even faraway Washington has suffered that indignity, and at the hands of the British. A fact which, considering our present happy relations, it hardly becomes us to mention.

! The furious Hun may never get to i Paris; but —as Carlyie once said to a Scotch parson about some uttermost ; effort, and said without rebuke —he will j "do his damndest." Think of the glory; I think of the moral (or immoral) effect; I think of the loot! Paris won, then will | come tho fruition of all those diabolic hope 3 which find expression in such utterances as this by a German general —von I Liebert—speaking for self and friends : For us there is only one principle to bo followed, and we must recognise no other. We hold that Might is Right. Wo must know neither sentiment, humanity, consideration, nor compassion. Wo will incorporate Couriand, and bring into our own population 60,000,000 Russians. Tho Slav nightmare will ride ue no longer. Wo must have Belgium and the North of France. . . . The Portuguese must disappear. France must pay until she is bled white. But the war would not end with the capture of Paris. Far from it. America has yet to be heard in this debate. And when the American case is fully put in there wil be another story.

Dear " Civis," —The naval story in Blackwood, from wliich you made an extract last week, was written, I believe, by a Dunedinite, a captain of a torpedoed U.S.S. Company steamer. The closing incident actually occurred at Wellington. It was a sound instinct, then, that led me to quote, and it was a happy guess when I suggested that the port .at which on arrival the captain of the trooper ran into a "sport" who seemed not to know that there was a war on, but was "in an 'ell of a rush" because "off to tho races," might be any port in New Zealand. In fact the port was Wellington, it appears. Authentic narrative by men of action is characteristic of Blaekwood, a feature carefully nursed. Mostly the writers are servants of the Empire by sea or land, always they have a story to tell, usually they tell it with some humour, at the worst they are not dull. The contributor of dulness finds his way to the waste-paper basket. Admitted to the pages of Blackwood our townsman is in good company, and he lives up to it. " Outward Bound" is the title of his vivid story, February number.

Zig-zagging through tho danger zone in daylight is bad; driving ahead blindly at night is worse. Minos and submarines are not the only danger; in the narrow seas shipping on the move may be anywhere, j and nothing carries lights. Hero are two I companion vignettes : ! The Saratoga zig-zagged throughout the whole day among a flotsam-strewed ocean, comprising casks and cases, hatchgratings and spars, deck-houses and i water-Togged boats, bearing at one© pathetic and stern testimony to the wanton ruthlessnoss, and close proximity of undersea pirates. Tho steamers sighted were given a wide berth. _ They 1 were, no doubt, friendly, but this was no time for idle curiosity. Night closes down—bitter, dank, and desolate; ship making 1 ! 3 knots. The hours pass; to the captain on the bridge, peering into the darkness ahead, is brought a steaming cup of coffee. Tho captain suddenly became rigid, the cup fell out of his hand, clattered, and

broke at bis feet. Ho yelled out hoarsely : " Hard a-port!" and stared wildly ahead as though hypnotised. The second officer rushed over to tho helmsman and saw the wheel, swung over correctly; had there been a moment's hesitation, or the helm moved the wrong way, the Saratoga would have smashed into the steamer she was overhauling. It was a narrow call. ''Steady!" shouted tho captain—- " course again !" Tho Saratoga swerved back on her course, and almost grazed alongside a huge lightless bulk 'of a steamer, about the same size as herself. They could hear the wheeze oi her engines as they passed. " Get a man to clear up tho wreck about mv feet," remarked the captain calmly. He leaned resignedly over the bridge rail: " Can't say I fancy this lights out game much 1" he muttered. Nobody fancies it. I quote this passage that I may bring in . a complaint by Sir Eric Geddes that there are shipmasters who " know full well the danger of unscreened lights, and risk them. They are given a course, and deliberately take another if it means saving time; and I have seen vessels in danger zones with as many lights showing as a liner in peace time. I know many vessels lost through disregarding the clearest instructions. ' Just so. The Britis3i seaman has the defects of his qualities—he will take risks. After all, it is a fault that leans to virtue's "side. There is a new star in the heavens, and with it comes an opening for what Professor Tyndall, a coiner of ornate phrase", called the Scientific Uses of the Imagination. Everywhere astronomers great and small are unanimously "on the job." The new star is a collision of meteoric swarms, say some; a sun blown up, say others; "a demonstration of my theory of partial impact," says Professor Bickerton, —two dark stars have cannoned into each other and made one superlatively bright one. The new star is probably a hundred million times as distant as the sun, —say in miles ninety million times a hundred millions. As there is all infinity to draw upon this seems quite a moderate estimate. The new star " began to shine in the reign of James I ; and its light "—travelling at twelve millions of miles a minute —" only reached the earth last Saturday." Plainly in all this there is more of imagination than of science. No one has yet discerned in the new star a new creation, referring it to the Great Astronomer, who, as the poet Young says— Rounded in his palm those fiery orbs, And bowled them naming through the dark profound. That suggestion may be left to Mr 11. G. Wells. And to the preachers may be left its construing as a political portent. The "good old German God," by whatever name he prefers to be invoked —Moloch, or Baal, or Beelzebub —has no concern with stars. Poison gas from, the nether pit is his natural element and fitting symbol. But other wars have had their comets; why should not the greatest of all Avars have its star? I proclaim this heavenly phenomenon, of a brilliancy to be seen in broad day, the Star of Hope for the Allies.

Punch and the comic papers continue to thrive on the food trouble, which has never been so much a trouble that they were unable to get fun out of it. The Ministry of Food is innocent of humour; surprise is its strong point. It announces, for example, that one pig ifl equal in food value to two sheep, weight for weight. Which is to say that from a slice of fried bacon at breakfast you get as much good as from two slices of roast mutton at dinner. This is official, and may be relied on. In the matter of tea, we read without emotion that much may be done with hawthorn tips and hedgerow clippings; our judicious tea-blenders must have known that all along. But when we come to the familiar potato we find to our astonishment that there are a world of things to learn. Major H. de Fonblanque Cox, Garrick Club, W.C., writes to the Pall Mall Gazette that " certain sportsmen in County Galway train their greyhounds and bring them to the slips in perfect condition exclusively on roast potatoes." Maybe; but these will be Irish greyhounds; I doubt whether any Sassenach dog would thrive on praties, roast or boiled. The gallant major proceeds, however, with enthusiasm : It'is a fact that an Irish labourer can do a hard day's work on this diet alone. But consumers almost invariably make a cardinal mistake in peeling or paring potatoes, whereby not only is there immense wastage in bulk, but the most nutritious and fiavoursome portion of the tuber is neglected. The rind of a potato is riot indigestible; on the contrary, it possesses properties which help to digest the pulp; especially is this tho case with regard to baked potatoes. So away with the knife, and wash, wash, wash! On the top of all this we have George Bernard Shaw, himself an Irishman of BOrts, proclaiming : " It is my patriotic boast that from the day the war began until the present hour, I have abstained rigidly from consuming flesh, fish., fowl,

alcohol, and tobacco." Ho adds, with a sense of lonely greatness : " But there is only one Bernard Shaw." That is so; one only,—thanks be ! My friend the Old Man-of-War's Man, for whom usually I make a corner because he is an old man-of-war's man—his service, he says, was in the Cossack, tho Rattler, and the Swallow—writes to correct my scepticism about tho baleful influence of moonlight on hanging fish and sleeping humans. Moonlight we know to be merely reflected sunlight; weaker it is, but otherwise none the worse. But of what value this " high priori'' against the lessons of experience? I was lying in Simon's Bay, in August, 1866, in her Majesty's surveying vessel Swallow, Staff Commander Wild. One night some of our chaps piled up the forecastle deck with fish they had caught (mackerel); part they flung overboard, part they cleaned and hung up in the fore rigging to dry; a few days later they took them down and packed them away. After Ave had put to sea, some_ of the hands came on deck one morning with their heads swollen about tho size of a 10-galkm keg, and their faces all flushed; and tho reason was they -had eaten moonstruck fish. Ptomaine poisoning, shall we say ? Fish will go bad in moonlight; much more' will they go bad in sunlight,—if the latitude is anywhere near that of Simon's Bay. But there remains the other case. Nearly every passage while I was afloat one or 'more of the hands would get moonblind. The reason was thai they would lie on deck at nig'ht facing the moon, with their eyes wido open, and go to sleep like that. When they awoko they Would be unable to see; but they would be nil right in the day time. This Would' last a week or two, during which time they would be ex-.' cuscd from keeping night watches. Looks like a put-up job. Be that as it may, the case is a case apart. With men who go to sleep with their eyes open anything may happen. I disclaim responsibility. Civis.