PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3763, 27 April 1926, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(Vroft Saturday's Otaco Daily Tima). “ Lest We Forget ” is the heading of a National Review article, with a subtitle, “ The Tragedy of the Dardanelles.” In New Zealand we are not forgetting, though time has done the work of time. Who shows a token of distress? No single tear, no mark of pain: O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? O grief, can grief be changed to less? O last regret, regret can die! No—mixed with all this mystic frame Her deep relations are the same, But with long use her tears are dry. On Anzac Day it is not with tears that we think of the flower of our New Zealand youth taken from us by the Great War, their lonely graves on the slopes of Gallipoli or the fields of Flanders. Sacrifice was exacted from the people of our name and race; we in New Zealand bore -our share, and, somehow, we think that in bearing our share we did well. Whatever the merit or demerit of the cause, certain it is that our Anzacs fought a good fight. And so we may write their final epitaph—- . Honour, honour, honour to them, Eternal honour to their name. It has 1/een suggested—l don’t say bv whom, except that they ar* people with f more sentiment than sense—that returned soldiers who can show the stump of a lost arm or leg should be paraded through tb« public schools for the purpose of I

teaching the children to “hate war.” Doesn't everybody hate war? But there are two parties to a war, as there are two parties to a burglary, and two parties to homicide. You are of the other part —hating all three; and for that very leason may resist a burglar, or knock on the head a cut-throat, or speak with the enemy in the gate. The maxim “si vis pacem, para helium'' has stood the test for ages, and the peace-mongering emotionalist is the worst enemy of peace Dr PickerilL of the Otacro University, writing on this subject to the Daily Times the other day. was able to sign himself: H. P PICKEBILL, Late Colonel, X.Z.M.C. Ret. Dunedin, March 31.

which is to say that he knew what lie was talking about. During the war it was my honour and privilege to be of some service to tho:e of our ‘‘boys'’ who suffered facial wounds, some of them so severe that one could only wonder how they had survived. As one well-known general exclaimed on seeing the records of such cases: “My God. I did not know men could be so wounded and still live."

With these experiences in mind. Dr Picked!] recommends Education Boards “to see that the coming generation does not grow up in ignorance of those thinjßß which have kept for it all the privileges is now has and is heir to.” Let returned soldiers visit the schools, —bv all means—as types and examples in whose footsteps it were an honour to tread.

“ Why are there no strikes in breweries?” asks a writer in the Morning Post. “Is it because there is a regular allowance of beer to the workers, which, if they struck work, would be gone for the period of the strike?” There can be little doubt. And it is a fair presumption that if coal mines could be run on brewery methods there would be no strike of the miners. Morning tea at 11 and afternoon tea at 3.30 contribute to the smooth working of many a liousehold; for tea substitute beer and try the same rule in the pits. Would that it were possible! The British Exchequer’s *§p to Cerberus—twenty millions sterling—might have been spared, and Mr Cook, the miners* secretary, whose talk is of red revolution, would find, his occupation gone. In the same paper I notice a criticism of the Bishop of London’s advice to schoolgirls—“ Whenever you come to have a young man, and he offers you a cocktail when he takes you out to dinner, don’t go with hi in again—choose another.” On which the criticism is—“ A punishment absurdly disproportionate to the offence.”

What the girl should say to the man is, “ No, George, thanks very much. We must learn how to live. It was these mixed atrocities, together with the ice-water habit, that ruined the palate of the Americans, and so led them to the use of strong spirits, with the resultant vices of prohibition and bootlegging. If, occasionally and not habitually, you wish to drink something before dinner, the instructed agree that it should be not a cocktail but a glass of dry unfortified sherry,”

Sound advice. But the girl would have flung herself away. Her talk is the talk of a philosopher. And George, with a cocktail habit, would have no use for a philosopher in petticoats. #

It is with thrills and throbs that we have appreciated the band of the 93rd Highlanders during these Exhibition weeks. At the skirl of the pipes, when the pipers came on, the fashion of our countenance may have changed with a feeling of tightness over the cheekbones; but hardly a smile. Our seriousness was too intent. The muscular exertions of the band conductor as he played—literally played—his orchestra, held us fascinated; but there seemed nothing extravagant. Js it not told of Beethoven that his conducting of his own music was with the contortions of the Sibyl, sinking lower and lower for a diminuendo; for a pianissimo almost creeping under the stand; for a forte at his full height on tiptoe; for a crescendo beyond that—his inches being not enough (5 feet 5 only!)—he would spring into the air with his arms extended as if wishing to float on the clouds? Coin pared with this, the conducting at the band rotunda lias been moderation itself. Conductor and band alike, it was musical art and military precision; our part the gravity of judges on the bench. When 10, at the benefit concert this week, the Festival Hall crammed to bursting, every bandsman revealed himself a finished comedian and the conductor a master of musical burlesque. Never was a Dun edin audience so unexpectedly thrown into fits. And when the chairman of directors appeared with the news that there was “£792 10s in the house” no thing was left but to shout “Encore!” Tliat is just it. We want the whole delightful absurdity over again.

The ancient and hoary joke that to get a joke into the head and mental perception of a Scotchman you need a surgical instrument is doubtless of Scottish origin. Tire £ rgical instrument is, of course, a corkscrew, and therein for the Scotchman bo made this joke lies the essence of c. There is Scottish humour in Scottish want of humour, as there is Irish wit in the Irish hull. When Sir Boyle Roche reminded the Irish Parliament that no man could be in two places at once, nless he were a bird, he intended the bull, and, in the roar that followed, his own laugh would be loudest. So when the Presbyterian minister in the Slictlands prayed for “ the ad jacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland ” it would he with a pawky sense of humour not inconsistent with

“ the long prayer.” So again the Deeside minister in Cratliie church which Queen Victoria when at Balmoral attended. One Sabbath morning, her Majesty being present, his “ long prayer ” included the petition that “ as the Queen became an auld woman she might put on the new man, and in all righteous causes stand before her people liko a lie-goat upon the mountains.” Again, the Scotsman, after explaining the tenets of the three principal religious bodies in Scotland to a perplexed Southerner who was forced to confess that he did not see much difference:— “ Aye, there may not lie in this life, but there will be all the difference in the world in the next! ” Once again,— towards the close of a countryside “Nicht wi’ Burns,” on 3 reveller to the next, lying with his head on the table: “ Wake up, Dumbledykes, man; it’s gey early; d’ye hear the cock craw?” But to him the neighbour on the other side: “Dumbledykes has been wi* his Maker this twa heurs, but I didna want to disturb the harmony.” No one is quicker to savour the quality of these stories than the Scotsmen who keep them

alive, and who probably invented them And there’s the humour of it.

Ministering to an appetite that grows by what it feeds on, I supplement Scottish stories by English. Sir Almeric Fitzroy, Clerk of the Privy Council, has two or three that are worth repenting. King Edward was a stickler for precision in ceremonial usage, noting with displeasure any informality of dress or manner in the people about him. Yet in Sir Almeric's diary we read : The other day Pembroke went to Buckingham Palace to inquire when it would be convenient for the King to receive an address, and found his Majesty having his corns cut. The King asked him whether he had got the address with him, and, on being told that he had, said. “Why not present it now?” Pembroke replied that he had not the High Steward’s wand, which w? supposed to be do rigueut on such an occasion. “Oh, never mind,” said the King, “take an umbrella !” And, rather to (Pembroke’s consternation, the ceremony was performed under such novel conditions. Picture the? King having his corns cut while a court official postures ceremonially with an umbrella! Once at Marienbad, whither King Edward resorted at intervals to take the waters and make a “cure," he asked a ladv to play bridge: but she excusing herself on the ground of her ignorance of the game, added quite innocently, "I really don’t know a King from a Knave.” This happy speech the King had humour enough to report and repeat. There is a dinner-table story in which Margot talks English slang to a foreigner “At Windsor the other day Mrs Asquith was talking to one of the Swedes, who taxed her credulity a little too high, upon which she said, ‘I think, monsieur, you axe pulling mv leg.’ ‘I assure you. madam, I have not touched it,’ was the r R P ] y-" As the initial letters of the name “ Australian and New Zealand Auxiliary Corps” give us “Anzac,” so the initial letters of the name “New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition” may yield us an industrial motto. “New Zeal and Sound Sense Enterprise.” For this discovery I am indebted to a correspondent, who in the symbol “N Z.S.S.E.” sees inspiration. So be it. Another letter about words is from “Anti-Spelling-Reform”— Dear “ Civis,” —I was pained to read the other day in an American text-hook of psychology—“ voluntary (Latin: volere, to will)”; the spellings “ autherised ” at the Ross Creek reservoir, and “ Filluel St.” somewhere in Logan Park, have long made me writhe in silence. But this latest I must needs halloo to the reverberate hills, particularly to Mt. Cargill. In our civic centre, the Octagon, there is the following line: “ Mt. Cargill. A Magnificiant View’. 2s Cd.” With all the surplus revenue, how about a Concise Oxford for the Corporation sign-painter? Latin, it is true, is innocent of the barbarism “volere. to will”; but you can’t expect the American Middle-West to know that. It was a Middle-West editor wlio wrote the other day: “ H Darwin attempts to visit America, he should not lie allowed to land on our enlightened shores.” But here in Dunedin, it seems, we exhibit the curiosities “ autherised,” “ Filluel St.,” and “ magnificiant.” If City official* are responsible, no City Councillor should be able to rest in his bed. Civia.