PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3494, 22 February 1921, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

- ■ ll.—■ (From Saturday’s Daily Times ) Touch and go. The phrase is of nautical origin, I imagine. If the good ship has misadventure with shoal or reef, hangs for a moment on the edge of destruction, but by favour of heaven scrapes clear to pursue afresh her destined way, it is touch and go. According to Admiral Sims of the American navy it was touch and go with Britain and her allies at a "■certain point in the third year of the war. Admiral Sims, as we k Tl ow, came over with American ships to lend a hand. From Sir John Jellicoe at the Admiralty he learned for the first time the true facts of the submarine campaign, and was “fairly astounded.” I _ had never imagined anything so terrible. “It looks as though the Germans were winning the war,” I said. “They will win unless we can stop these losses—and stop them soon,” the Admiral replied. “Is the® no solution for the problem?” I asked. “Absolutely none that we can see now,” Jellicoe announced. This was April the 9th, 1917. That same week the U-boat pirates had sunk 240,000 tons of shipping ; continuance at which

rate meant losses of 1,000,000 tons a month and an early German victory. Nothing was left to rely on but Providence and the proverbial luck of the British, which is the same thing. As common report has it the wide world over—“ The British in their wars may lose battles, but they always win the last.” And so it was in the Providential scheme of things that a solution of the insoluble should be found and U-boat piracy countered. Otherwise, Australia and New Zealand had been prize of war, and we New Zealanders subjects of the Kaiser.

The Kaiser, lifting up a whine from his Dutch oubliette, the pit of the forgotten, contrives to inform mankind that he exists, and Germany in particular that he is not averse to a new adventure. If Tino may go back to Athens, why not Wilhelm to Potsdam? True the immediate future is dark; but Germany may yet repent. “My people,” he says, “betrayed themselves, then God and me.” Notice the crescendo and the climax: themselves—and God—and ME.. “For twentysix difficult years” he “alone had fought to keep the peace,” till “the sword of peace” was struck from his hand. Here, as Mrs Malaprop would say, is a nice derangement of epitaphs. It would be with the sword of peace and fighting to

keep the peace that through twenty-six bumptious years he played Bom bastes Furioso, boasting of his mailed fist and shining armour, and challenging his neighbours—Who dares this pair of boots displace Must meet Bombastes face to face. That phase has ended. Vanished, too, the Imperial Beau Brummel with liis 365 separate uniforms and his special squad of flunkeys to look after them. But the Hohenzoilern Chad band-cum-Stiggins remains to admonish the world of its wickedness in forsaking God (“and ME!”); also to talk of Britain as Germany's “eternal enemy,”—wherein Ghadband-cum-Stiggins lies, and knows it. Pity the poor Kaiser! With whining note he for a moment lifts himself from out the pit of the forgotten, as Paranati in Dante from out his sarcophagus of fire, —for a moment, then to fall back again. “ The Crucifixion of Ireland,” the title of your Dunedin lecture—please, Mr Fraser, M.P.—- is a question-begging title. It assumes and implies that Ireland is an innocent Christ; that Mr Lloyd George is Pontius Pilate, or Herod, or both; and that the people of England, Scotland, and Wales are a mob of unbelieving jews, thirsting for blood. All of which points assumed in your title—please, Mr Fraser, M.P.—are points in dispute. I repeat the “ M.P.,” not satirically, not in irony, but because it should connote acquaintance with the rule that points in dispute are not to be assumed, —in other words that question-begging is barred in logic. Please, M r Fraser, M.P., try to get out of a bad habit, and before you lecture again assimilate, if vou can, a few elementary facts: That geographically the British Isles are one thing—one and indivisible. That the sea between unites, not divides, —is God’s common highway, needing no upkeep, never out of repair. That if Ireland is a nation, then Wales is a nation, Cornwall is a nation, Scotland is two nations —delimited by the Highland line; and that all these nations are equally entitled to separation. segregation, elevation, and all other ’at.ions included under the, blessed formula of “self-determination.” That a detail of the crucifixion of Ireland was the Wyndham Land Purchase Act which made the rack-rented peasant a proprietor, and paid off the rackrenting landlord by a hundred millions sterling provided by the erucifiers. That another detail of the crucifixion is the hunting down of a murder-gang of Thugs, whose thuggeries are blackening to eternity the Irish name. Get into your head, please, Mr Fraser, M.P., these facts and a few other such. Also—and this is important—clear your mind of cant. Dear “ Civis,” —Under the title of “Marge Askinforit,” Barry Pain has written a burlesque or parody of Mrs Margot Asquith’s notorious Autobiography. I send you a specimen bit, if you can give space. It is not below the level of your column, although you didn’t write it. Barry Pain, do you say? Hand it in;— I am not proud. Our visitor pestered my sister and myself with his absolute inattention. At last I thought that it would be kind to offer him a little encouragement. He usually went for a walk on Sunday mornings, and one Sunday I said that I would accompany him. “Better not,” he said; “looks to me like rain.” “But you have an umbrella,” I pointed out. “Aye,” he said, ‘ and when two people share one umbrella, they both get all the drippings from it and none of the protection. You take a nice book and read for a bit.” “No,” I said; “I’m coming with you, and, though it’s Leap Year, I definitely promiso not to propose to you.” “Well,” he said, “that makes a difference.” I thrust my arm into his gaily and confidentially, and he immediately unhooked. Wo went on to the Heath together. “I was once told by a psalmist,” I said, “that I had a mysterious and magnetic attraction for men.” “Those psalmists will say anything,” ho said. “It's just the other

way round really.” “Perhaps,” I said. “I know I have an unlimited capacity for love—and nobody seems to want it.” “Ah,” he said, “it’s a pity to be overstocked with a perishable article. It means parting with it at a loss.” What could I say to a brute like that? And I had nobody there to protect me. “I wish,” I said, “that you’d look if I’ve a fly in my eye.” “If you had, you’d know,” ho answered. “The fly sees to that.” Some minutes elapsed before I asked him to tie my shoe-lace. He looked down and said that it was not undone. I simply turned round and left him; I was not going to stay there to be insulted. By the side of this pleasant invention put an item that is fact. A recently published biography of the twin brothers Grenfell, gallant English gentlemen who both fell in the war, is an account by one of them of a big house party at Hatfield, the seat of the Cecils. . . . I made great pals with Mrs Asquith. I do not know if you know her, but she is an absolute clinker. She dressed up as a Spanish dancer, and did a iias seul before us all. What w ill people say in about twenty years when they hear this! The leading lady of the Government dancing a pas seul, while the Chancellor of the Exchequer looked on! Hugh Cecil said he thought ho had dislocated the inner organs of his body from laughter Mrs Asquith’s dizzy celebrity is embarrassing to everybody of her name. Mr Asquith is no longer slr Asquith. He is the husband of Mrs Asquith. Grousing as an amusement, a relief, a recreation, has always been conceded to the British soldier. To grouse is not to rebel against soldiering itself, its main facts and features. Grouser is not the same as slacker; the word doesn’t connote a slowness in going over the top. A good soldier may be a good grouser and find matter for grousing in lesser inconveniences than death and wounds. “Digger,” who sends me a grousing letter, I have allowed to say his say, not bating him a word :—- Balclutha, February 12. Dear “Givis,” —The Otago Daiiy Times, in its issue of the 11th inst., under the heading of “News in Brief,” states: “Returned soldiers are now selling fresh fish on two days a week in the Masterton streets.” Now, I wonder just why this poor unfortunate individual —the returned soldier—is still being singled out for special mention. Is he still in a class by himself, and how long will he remain so? Will wo read in 2001 A.D. that “Mr J , grandson of a returned soldier, was seen in an intoxicated condition last Saturday”? Or perhaps the paragraph was indited in a desire to spur on the contemporary tradesmen of Masterton to emulate the example of the battle-scarred veterans referred to, and retail fish which was also fresh. The paragraph read in this light would seem to indicate that Masterton hag not, up to the advent of the returned soldier into the trade, enjoyed the benefits of such a noted brain food as fish. The indication is still further strengthened when the paltriness of the news item as a news item is considered. If this is what Prohibition has brought Masterton to, then may Heaven help Otago Daily Times literary scribes when friend (I nearly wrote “Send”) Pussyfoot gets his velvet hand on Dour Dunedin. —Yours, Digger. To say of a man that he is a returned soldier is to compliment him ; to say that as a returned soldier he sells fresh fish is to compliment him twice. Had stinking fish been insinuated, the grousing of my friend the “Digger” might be justified. As the case stands it can only be excused. Certain it is, I confess, that our gratitude to returned soldiers for saving the Empire has not precisely overwhelmed them. In England, thousands of exservice men are out of work and starving ; in their behoof Lord Haig preaches, prays, protests,—labours night and day. So it was also in days before the war: —the best resource of a man dismissed from the army was to sneak back again, contrary to the Regulations. I’m ’ere in a ticky ulster an' a broken billycock 'at, A-layin’ on to the sergeant I don't know a gun from a bat. I done my six years' service. ’Er Majesty sez: “Good-clay— l You'll please to come when you’re rung for, an’ ’ere’s your ’ole back pay; An fourpence a day for baccy—an’ bloomin’ gen’rous, too; An’ now you can make your fortune—the same as your orf'cers clo.” I tried my luck for a quarter, an’ that was enough for me, An' I thought of ’Er Majesty’s barricks, an’ I thought I’d go an’ see; * The sergeant arst no questions, but ’e winked the other eye; ’E sez to me, “Shun!’ an’ I shunted, the same as in days gone by; For ’o saw the set o’ my shoulders, an' I couldn't help ’olclin’ straight When mo an the other rookies came under the barrick gate. Back to the army again, sergeant, Back to the army again; 'Oo would ha' thought I could carry an’ port ? I'm back to the army again. To-day no such door of hope or desperation exists. The returned soldier

wouldn’t get back to the army if he could, and couldn’t if ho would. Wliat really bothers him is that he cannot get back to his old job. % ~———— It was about the pathetic in Bums that an Englishman and a Scotchman fell to argument,—the Scotchman an Ayrshire man to boot,—Burns’s own county. “if it’s pathos you want,” said he to the southerner, “ what could you have better than ‘To Mary in Heaven ’” ? They turned up the book. “ Let’s see,” said the Scot, running down the index, —“ ‘ To Alex. Cunningham,’ ‘To a Mountain Daisy,’ ‘To a Mouse,’ ‘To a Louse,' — um, ah—‘ To John M'Murdo,’ ah, here we have it—‘ To Mary in Heaven,’ 339.” He began to read: Thou lingering star, with lessening ray, That lov’st to greet the early mom, Again thou usherest in the day My Mary from my soul was torn. O Mary! dear departed shade, Where is thy place of blissful rest? See’st thou thy lover lowly laid Hear’st thou Ihe groans that rend his breast ? “ All right,”—interrupted the Englishman ; ‘‘you needn’t read the rest; very pretty. But there isn’t a word of Scotch in it. It’s just the smooth verse and the conventional sentiment that any eighteenth century Fleet Street poetaster would write. I don’t know much about Burns; but what’s that in ‘Auld Lang Syne’ about paddling in the bum and pulling the gowans? By the way, what is a gowan?” “ A gowan is a daisy,” said the other. “ A daisy?—l thought a daisy was a laverock.” “ A laverock is a Lark,” exclaimed the scandalised Scot; —“ here, let me read.” And he read the two verses: We twa hae run about the braos, And pu’d the gowans fine; But we’ve wandered many a weary fitt, Sin’ auld lang syne. We twa hae paidl’d in the burn, Frae morning sun till dine; But seas between us braid hoe roared Sin’ auld lang syne. ” That’s it,” —took up the Englishman ; “ fancy two old fellows, each as hard as nails, severing oceans behind them and many a weary foot, taking hands and looking back through mists of memory to the days they were boys together, wandering on the braes and paddling in the burn. It’s simplicity; it’s nature; and it brings tears to the eyes. That is Burns at his best.” “ Maybe ye’re right,” said the Scotchman, meditatively, filling his pipe. ■CIVTS.