KISSING.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12063, 19 July 1917, Page 4

KISSING.

WHEN THE TROOPS ARE

LEAVING.

(Correspondent Chicago " Tribune.") LONDON, May 12.

Have you over been in a densely crowded place with a multitude of men and women engaged in saying good-bye to each other? The most accentuated noiso above the moving of the crowd is the .sound of kissing. The other evening E went to Victoria Station, one of the great London termini, to Bee a couple of young officers off to a tegimor.t stationed in the south-east of England. It was one of those nights when a special number of troops are being sent through I<> various depots, and I should think there must have been several thousand people closely packed within the onto - limits of tin* big station. Every man in khaki had one, and sonv limew- three people. eh'.eflv women, to off, and they wc-ro all saying good-bye with that thoroughlies'; t<> which we have become accustomed in London during war time. XOTHIXG BUT KISSES.

As the time approached for the departure of each train the sound of kissing seemed to positively permeate the atmosphere- I have never heard kissing carried on at such a wholesale rato before in my life. It had. of course, its conr.c side, for there were many perfunctory salutes, a largo number of obligatory ones, and mnnv'ihat were just stolen for the i'un of the thing. But then there was the. tr'agedv of "it, and, really, the little human' dramas that were played out in thai seething multitude in the .atmosphere of khaki and ir. the uncertainty of the future wore things that could have inspired a novelist, or a poet into realms quite beyond the ordinary claptrap of sentimentality. It, was not specially the tragedy or the voung—the girls who clung to hoys and" kissed with that hearty abandon that knows no shame and _ very little restraint —but it was the kisses of the acred, the old mothers and fathers who only' saw youth through the eves of the sons in whose strength and valour they took pride. Tt< was these old people lighting against the stream of humanity in all the flood tide of its power and its triumphant youth that seemed so sad. They wi re left behind, unable tn do anvthing in the huge volume that is now being written by men who each supply their page of enthusiasm ana individuality to every chapter of the world's great history under .course of construction. OLD AGE'S KISS. Their kisses, oddly enough, seemed more noisy—one heard them abovo the softer sounds of youthful lips that met. and parted. It. cannot be that the fashion of kissing is changed, but these men and women of an older generation gave a strange effect of substantiality to their caresses thati added to the weird mental picture one was able to secure. Long after I had left the station the strange, sound of tho9e myriad kisses echoed and re-echoed in my mind until they became almost actualities. The kiss of Youth and Hope, the kiss of Old Age and Resignation.