IN THE BARBER'S CHAIR

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9115, 21 December 1907, Page 4

IN THE BARBER'S CHAIR

No. XIV. NATIONAL DEFENCE. (Written for the " Star.") If you take ft sword and dror it, and go stick a feller thru, Guv'ment ain't to answer fer it; God'll eend the bill to yew I " Had a most intercstin' fellow in here yesterday," said the Barber. "Military lookin' man, Norfolk suit | buttoned up to iiis chin, walked this way." He illustrated. "He had what you read about, a soldiery bearin', ,and if it hadn't been for his stomach gettin' a bit out of hand, you'd have swore ! he was one of .the Christchurch Voluni teer officers in plain clothes. Ho oorao in here and looks round, and eaya ' Brrrrpl' I says ' Yessir,' and he says ' Brrrrpl Can I have my hair out now. without any back-talk P Bvrrpl' I could see I'd struck a card, and although I didn't like the way ho kept on exploding 'cause he might have got hissolf cut. I says he could, and he eat down. He d no sooner got settled than ho blew up some more, and started in to gas hi a manner shockin' to behold. That talkative barbel* I was holdin' up to you as a horrid example oouldn't hold a oandlo to him. He says to me, wns I over in the Volunteers nere. I eaya ' no,' and then he asks me if I come from Home, ' and had I been in the Army. I said I was a good colonial, and never been a solider at all. At that he began to Mow up_ about every ,two seconds for half a minute. He Aot red in the face, and T thought 6urelie was goin' to have an apocalypse. When he recovered, he says : ' What I a fine young man like you never had no military trainin' P w nat the devil is the service comin' to? Why, at Home we'd pay a Khillin 1 a nead for men like you, and glad to get 'cml' I said I was gettin' more than that for myself here, thanks. Then he blew ™it his spark plug again, and said it was like our condemned colonial independence. 'If I had my way, young man,' he said, ' every man jack of you would go through the Army somehow or other, if .you nad to be pushed through with a fork. Brrrpl' I told him I was veiar •handy with a shot-gun, and could generally hit a rabbit when I aimed at it. Then he got calm and settled down to tell me things. He spoke like a father, and assured me that shot-guns was nob a real patriotic proposition. I told him I was probably the most patriotio fellow in New Zealand, and he said he was glad, to hear it. Then he says a whole lot about the cadet movement. Course, you know I've always been interested in ithe cadets, and I listened to. him with the respect due to an old man that knew his business, even if he did go off * Brrrrp I' every minute, rt appeared his hobby was rifle-shootin' for everybody, like he said the Swisses had. The people there, he said, lived in an infernal little country that was pretty small and pretty crowded, and ■tfhere wasn't much room to spare for shootin', what with inhabitants and the English Johnnies that went there Alpin'. But the people had to' have their shootin', he says, so what did they do? They get a bit of a range, somewhere where the country is long enough, and make a narrow strip with a target at the end. A little way from the man that's shootin' there's a board with a hole in it,, go's 't he can just see the whole of the target through it. Then, if hie bullet's goin 1 miss tihe [ target at all» it'll be stopped by the board. He said the annual eavift' in tourist life there, compared with what it'd be' if they was fallin' all over the rifle-ranges here, was tremendous. He didn't say whether the savin' would be as big if it wasn't for t!be board, but I've heard the Swisses are pretty good shots, and -tfhey don't miss much. He ! told me the Govef mnent was gettin' a lot of pea-rifles for the cadets to go t&ootinr with;' and he says it was a very good ijhing. ' Give up your shotgun, young man ' he says. .' Brrrrp 1 Go and jom the Volunteers, or a club, or something, and leafn to shoot straight. Shot-guns is like hittm' a man with a load of hay. There's no art in a shot-gun. There is some in seem' a man a mile off and punchm him on his second to bottom, button with a little thing like that,' and he took out a bullet. So here I am, full of patriotism and enthusiasm again, thinkin' of joinin' the Volunteers, and wonderin' whether I oughtnt. to start with a pea-rifle. I think the Volunteers would be too expensive. I want to be in a crowd that had a name for smartness, and that sort's a bit expensive to belong to, they say. P'raps a pea-nfle would be the. best way, after all. Then I could hire a section, get George to cut a hole in a board, Swiss fashion, and get to work. In about a year I guess I'd be an efficient defender or my country. It's quite easy for meet fellows to get to be decent shots. I know a girl that's a risky proposition with a gun if she's half a mile off, and I don't see why women shouklnt go in for the noble defender act a bit, too. Lot of people have got an idea it s hard to shoot straight, but it am t. It's hard to shoot very straight, I admit. It's always the way in the world. If you get a lot of men competing in anything, there's a few duffers and a lot of pretty good ones. All the pretty good ones will make good time or gocd scores. Then there'll be a few who can put on an extra point or two, and they f re the only ones you hear about, so that it looks aa if they're the only ones that's any good. All the same, the pretfty good ones are good enough for all practical purposes. You don t need to be able to do a hundred yards in ten and a fifth to get away from the average bull, and the chances are the extra fast bull won't get loose, and you won't be about if he does. There wasn't many extra crack shots in South Africa if the truth was known, on either side. The men was just good shots, the Boers I mean. Put them %n a range, and I guess we've got a lot of men here that'd be able to show them where the target really was. But they was good enough for all practical purposes. Same with the British side, i who wasn't all good shots by a long way. They was good enough, though. I look at it this way_. War is wronig. It's part of my business to do a bit to stop it, even if it ain't in my time; and my patriotism is the way I do it. If I can get to shoot well, and everybody else gets to shoot well, there won't be anybody to tackle us. That is if we get sos't we can bit whatever we aim at without a miss. If they d been all like that in South Africa there wouldn't hay© been anybody left to tell the tale. Course, other countries would probably start and learn to shoot, but what if they didP It wouldn't take them a week to see that it wouldn't be the least bit of good goin' to war when they hadn't a chance of gettin' anybody out of the scrap to benefit by it. Them war balloons and tilings, and big battleships is goin' to be the end of fightin*. The fellows that invented coudite and Maxims,- and find out the quickest ways to drill holes into ships ought to sit on the Peace Conference, with no end of funds. >They ought to be given a million tons of dynamite, and a million tons of cordite, and about as much cartridges, and then deal them out to the nations that didn't feel too good to each other* Then they ought to say ' There you are. This scrap won t cost you'nothin', sail in and bust each other.' Instead of a Peace Conference it ought to be a War Board, gettin' a regular income from all the nations, and ready to pay for any old war that was wanted at" any time. They'd soon find that if they could get their ware for nothing, and that the other fellow could too, it wouldn't be near so nice. It's always most of the game to know that ' the other side's cash is runnin' put. and in my idea

there wouldn't be no runnin' out of cash. Each side could hang out as long ac the other. They'd only be mesein' the place up and makin' a bad smell. That*d put a stop to their wars. In the "meantime I think the old josser' in the button-up coat was right. We ought to learn, to shoot."