Topics of the Week.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIV, Issue IV, 27 January 1900, Page 157

Topics of the Week.

THE SECOND CONTINGENT. Even a casual observer must have noticed a marked difference between the deportment of the second contingent which left Wellington for South Africa on Saturday last and that of the first contingent. Tutting aside the boylike enthusiasm of the latter, there was a certain diffidence in their demeanour, a military modesty, if there is such a thing. The men were conscious of their inexperience, and filled with some natural misgivings as to their ability to fight in the same ranks as trained soldiers. It is not impossible also that they were not perfectly sure of how they would like Mauser bullets, which, of course, is quite an acquired taste. And small blame to them if they did feel a trifle uncomfortable. Most people are a trifle upset on similar occasions. But I don’t believe the second contingent had many misgivings of any kind". They embarked on their journey covered with the reflected prestige and glory which the New Zealanders now in South Africa, have won for the colony. The latter, inexperienced and untried as they were, have proved themselves very soldiers indeed, and the men who left on Saturday, their companions in arms, felt justified in appropriating their share of the renown which the first contingent has gained for the New Zealand soldier on the fields of Africa. They felt heroes by proxy. You could see it in their very match, the swing-of their bodies, the pose o' their heads, the flash of their eyes. Already they were of an army that had traditions of its own, though only of yesterday, to uphold. Verily victory sat nodding in their plumes as they passed between the cheering multitude. No matter that most of them had never drawn trigger on anything more animate than a butt. The spirit of their comrades in South Africa, who have had their share of fighting, burned in their veins, and by that magical telepathy whieh- maintains the glorious esprit de corps existing among the crack companies of the world they felt one with them. Thus it may be said that whatever they are by virtue of actual experience these boys of ours who went away with the Waiwera on Saturday are already proved soldiers in spirit. When they reach the scene of hostilities they will take to fighting as ducklings to the water, and feel as much at home picking off Boers as shooting rabbits in dear old New Zealand. Yes, and there will be plenty of others ripe to follow’ them to the wars, for the military spirit has been born to life in this little colony. You notice it everywhere, but its present manifestations, marked though they be, are nothing to what we shall witness when our boys return crowned with glory. Then no one will be in the same street with the dashing militaires. Khakee will be the rage with the girls, and epaulets will carry a man anywhere. And where, where shall we poor civilians be in that day! © ® ® OUR GALLANT BOYS. The new’s of the death of Trooper Connell of Auckland and of Sergeant Gourley of Dunedin, who fell in a gallant charge against the Boers, brings home to New Zealanders in the North arid South the peril and desolation of war, as perhaps no previous record of loss of life on the field has done. We have read in the daily papers message after message of how this company it the Imperial forces lost so many men, and bcw that company suffered heavily, ami the death-roll has c -nlaiued much too large a proportion of distinguished names, for the wav has been cne peculiarly fatal to the leaders of our troops. Death has been well entertained in the Imperial ranks. But these tables of casualties, these lists of gallant gentlemen, drawn from the first families in the United Kingdom, who have come to a glorious if untimely end have moved us little, ns compared with the report of the New Zealanders who have fallen. With their death we learn the sorrow that comes to us when stricken in our own house, we taste with our own lips the first bitter fruits of war. Even though we may not be related to them by blood ties, nor indeed the ties of friendship, or those of mere acquaintanceship, we feel towards every man in our contingent ns we cannot feel not even towards the most distinguished soldier in the regular army.

For every one of t'hem carries our national honour in his knapsack, the honour of the proudest little colony on the face of the earth. Every British soldier and sailor has been taught that the honour of the Empire is, in the same way, in his keeping, and it needs no Nelson to remind him of it. But there is, I take it, a vast difference between the ordinary Tommy and the colonial volunteer in the degree in which each appreciates the responsibility that rests on him and in the interest which his countrymen take In him. Except in time of actual war the great British public evince no very deep concern in Tommy’s welfare. They are as forgetful with regard to the duties they owe him, as he, poor absent-minded beggar, is in regard to the claims others have on him. In peace Tommy is not of much account. At a similar time the colonial volunteer is scarcely regarded with more respect. When it comes to fighting, however, the status of each undergoes a big change, and then it is that t'he colonial scores. Tommy then becomes a. hero just as well as his comrade from the colonies, but no Tommy in the whole army can ever calculate on suc’h a rise in the public appreciation as the colonial. The eulogy and sympathy, and admiration poured out by the British public on the army may be strong and fervid enough, but the impersonality of the object on which it is lavished detracts from its value. The personal factor is absent. Tommy knows the British public as a body, and the British public know Tommy as a part of another body. The colonial soldier knows and is known in quite another way. Every Tom, Dick. Harry of them is, and feels that he is the centre of a strong personal interest. He is no mere impersonal unit, glorious or unglorious, but a man with scores of friends anxiously watching his every move, and a whole colony full of ardent admirers, who though they may not all know his name, will be eager to learn it when he does or dies, and will cherish it as the name of a New Zealander. There must be something more than ordinarily inspiring- in fighting under such conditions, and it does not surprise one to learn that our boys should invariably have behaved so well at the front. Unused to warfare and but partially disciplined as they certainly are, the 'higher sense of national honour which they must individually feel added to the natural intelligence of men of their class must make them foes to be reckoned with. When they left us there was a half feeling in some minds i'hat war would certainly have more terrors for these brave volunteers who had never faced a foe in actual fight, than for the hardened soldiers in t'he army. But Sergeant Gourley and Trooper Connell have gloriously demonstrated to us that the New Zealand boys are as eager and able to drink delight of battle as any men in Her Majesty’s fiorces. All honour and renown to you, Connell and Gourley, brave volunteers, first of New Zealanders with Bradford of I’acroa to marc'h into the valley of death at the bugle call of duty. ® ® ® THE CULT OF COLOUR. There is evidently a. close relationship between temperature and colour. Nature declares the faet in every zone, from the tropic to the frigid. She girds the world between Capricorn and Cancer with a girdle of glowing hues, but outside those limits attires mother earth in more sombre apparel. The farther north and the farther south you go the brilliant colours grow fainter and fainter, till at length at the poles you come to a region where colour is not. In theirtastes the sons and daughters of men seem to imitate nature. The peoples of the colder latitudes show less appreciation of gorgeous tints than those who live in warmer dimes. What a. contrast there is between the dress of the folks of Northern Europe and those of the Sunny South; what a contrast even in the houses they inhabit. Tn the North there is no effort to bedeck the dwellings with extraneous colour: they stand forth in all the unattractiveness of their native brick or stone; and the people, in their avoidance of vivid colouring in their dress, would seem to shun the possibility of introducing anything that might mar the completeness of that monotonous harmony in grey. In

Italy and Southern Europe generally the empire of colour aserts itself most unmistakeably. A want of colour jars painfully on the Italian’s eye. He wearies of the lack of it. His aesthetic taste may be atrocious, and very often is. He may have next to no sense of harmony, and look contentedly on hues at deadly war with one another, but colour for itself he dearly loves with a universal affection. We colonists in Australasia do not naturally inherit the colour love any more than do the folks in the Old Laud, yet no one can dispute its string development amongst us. The warm sun has done its work with us, and the tendency is altogether in the direction of warm, bright colours. You see it more and more in our houses and in our dresses; and as feminine attire lends itself particularly to beautiful hues, the ladies become the great exponents of the colour cult. At Home the ladies only burst into leaf in the matter of graceful attire; here, under the warm Australasian sun, they may be said to break into blossom. It is in Sydney and Melbourne that one sees this efflorescence at its height. Beautifully coloured raiment is a feature of every holiday- crowd in these colonies; but it is in "the streets of the New South Wales or Victorian metropolis that the triumph of the dyer’s art is made apparent. As visitors to Sydney and Melbourne know, there is no colour too gay for t ie girls in these cities. What the New Zealand girl would hesitate to don even for a race meeting the Sydney girl wears when she goes a-shopping :.uy and every day in the week, with the result that the pavements are ablaze with colour like a brilliant parterre. The presence of these gay figures grouped around the shop windows or threading the more sombre-clad crowd, is suggestive of nothing so much as a scene in an opera. To one accustomed to a less gaudy assemblage in the public street these kaleidoscopic effects are at first a little startling, but eventually one gets used to them, and appreciates the enlivening effect they have on the lookout. And they have a further effect, these gay toilettes. Unquestionably they tell in favour of a style of dress, for both men and women, more suited to our semi-tropic climate. If their brilliancy may evoke adverse comment, it is associated with a lightness and coolness which none can fail to appreciate who has sweltered through the dog-days in irrational garments of heavy- cloth. But to hark back from the utilitarian to the aesthetic aspect < f the matter. Why, after all, should one object to beautifully- coloured raiment? Surely the objection rests on very slender grounds, and is but a prejudice born of long-established customs in dress—• customs whieh had their origin under other skies, and inculcated dress laws quite unsuitable for our climate. Therefore, my conclusion is that our girls might do much worse than imitate more closely than they- do the Australian brightness and lightness of apparel.