Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Issue 43, 26 October 1899, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

' Mr. Dooley ' thus discourses on the quality of courage in war : ' There ain't such a lot iv diff'rence between the bravest man in the worruld an' the cow'rdliest. Not such a lot, Hinnissy. 'Tis a question iv how the blood is pumped. Whin a man shows the sthrain, whin he gets thin an' pale an' worrid in the time for fightin', he's mighty near a coward. But whin his face flames an' his neck swells an 1 his eyes look like a couple iv elethric lamps again a cyclone sky, he'd lead a ferlorn hope acrost the battlemints iv hell.' Poets, rhapsodists, raw and enthusiastic war correspondents, and writers of history-CKW-fiction of the type of the Rev. W. H. Fitchett represent campaigning as made up chiefly of that glamour of individual valour and dash in the rank and file which has ever had a touch of high romance to the eye of the crowd. The valour and dash often come, but we are seldom told that they come as the result of a grim course of military training and experience which constitute no small part of the sickening realities of actual war. It may be news to some of our readers to hear that it is one thing to possess native courage, but quite another thing to keep cool and free from 'funk' when shells go screeching like demons past your ears. And yet such is the case. The members of the New Zealand contingent that have gone to do some shooting in this lamentable war in South Africa may be full to the chin of personal courage. But it casts no reflection on their native bravery to say that many of them may ' show the sthrain ' and 'get pale and worrid in the time for fightin' ' before they have acquired what is technically known as fire-discipline — which is the grand test of true soldierhood. Dapper marching and smart appearance and polished buttons and spotless accoutrements are all of importance in their proper degree, but fire-discipline is first, second, third, and everywhere, and until it is acquired, even a New Zealand volunteer is not much of a fighter.

In Rattlin the Reefer Captain Marryat thus gives the three stages through which every soldier passes before he acquires the determined coolness which marks the old campaigner : 'The first lesson in. bravery is to assume the appearance of it ; the second, to sustain the appearance ; and the third will find you with all the courage that doth become a man.' But the green levy often breaks down under the ' sthrain ' of the first lesson, turns tail, and makes a record and a bee-line to the lee side of the first wall or tree or boulder that promises to protect his cuticle from the impact of hostile lead. It would be nothing short of a Bulgarian atrocity to hint that any New Zealander would show the nape of his neck or the heels of his boots to the unspeakable Boer. And yet such things might happen — and that, too, under the pressure of vulgar and unromantic ' funk ' — in his first skirmish, to the pluckiest man, who, in his next tussle with Oom Paul's burghers, might prove himself a hero of Homeric mould. For ' bolting ' from the zone of fire is a rather usual incident of campaigning, and more especially of campaigning in South Africa. At Majuba Hill both Boer and Briton took sore fright. The only difference between them was this : that the Boer had the better nerve. He pulled himself sooner together, recovered his presence of mind first, and, to use the American expression, was c quicker on the draw.' That was all. The disaster of Isandwlana, and the follies of Ginghilovo, 'Fort Funk,' and the nights on the white Umvaloosi are further instances in point.

General Sheridan — ' Fighting Phil,' as the Americans loved to call him — went through the Franco-German campaign of 1870-1871 in company with Moltke and the German headquarter staff. In his Memoirs he subsequently told how he once, during an egagement, saw four Prussians lying down

WHAT LIES BEFORE THE NEWZEALAND CONTINGENT.

one behind another on the ' safe ' side of a single tree. He also described how the German troops once bolted pell-mell from the front, hurrying with them in their panic-flight the aged emperor, who in vain endeavoured to get them to return once more to the fight. German officers were furious with Sheridan for writing the truth of what he had personally eye-witnessed. They need not have been so sensitive. The same thing occurs in all armies. Here is what Lord Wolseley says on the subject^ 'The public little knows how often soldiers "cut and run." On one occasion my own men ran from me in sheer panic, leaving me alone. All soldiers run away at times. I believe that the British soldier runs away less than the soldier of any other nation, but he also runs away sometimes. There is a great deal of human nature in soldiers, but the loss from skulking and desertion in the great conscript armies of the Continent attains dimensions of which the English public have no notion.' A work entitled The Summer Night's Dream was translated from the German in 1890. Its author was also the writer of one of the ablest books on modern tactics. He gives a woful account of the numbers of those who run away, without, however, any desire to ' fight another day.' In his Barracks, Bivouacs, and Battles, Archibald Forbes, the great war correspondent, says : 'My own belief, founded on some experience of divers nationalities in war-time, is that most men are naturally cowards. I have the fullest belief in the force of the colonel's retort to the major. " Colonel," said the major, in a hot fire, "you are afraid. [ see you tremble." "Yes, sir," replied the colonel, and if you were as afraid as I am, you would run away." I do think three out of four men would run away if they dared. There are, doubtless, some men whom nature has constituted so obtuse as not to know fear, and who, therefore, deserve no credit for their courage; and there are others with nerves so strong as to crush down the rising "funk." The madness of blood does get into men's heads, no doubt. . . But most men are like the colonel of the dialogue — they display bravery because in the presence of their comrades they are too great cowards to evince poltroonery.'

This is putting the matter with uncompromising bluntness. But Wolseley and Forbes and the rest of them know what they were talking about, and a sentence of their testimony is worth a rood of Kipling's soldier-ballads and an acre of the bombast sent by green correspondents gushing over their first experience of the actualities of a campaign. The New Zealand contingent will probably do as well as any other troops in this miserable Transvaal business — when they and their mounts have, by practical experience, mastered fire-discipline, which is the crowning result of assiduous professional training. It will take time. But they will probably have eaten their Christmas pudding before they hear the hum of Boer bullets and the crash or Boer shells about their ears, and the dull thud which tells that one of their fellows has lost — temporarily or for ever and aye — the number of his mess, and witness the other sights and scenes of war, and acquire that familiarity with blood and death which alone gives coolness to a soldier when under fire. In the Franco-German war a smart skirmish was one day going on outside Meti. The German battalion engaged consisted chiefly of raw young soldiers. They were unsteady under the fire ot the French. An old German general was looking on. He shrugged his broad shoulders and remarked to an English war correspondent who stood by his side : ' Dey vant to be a little shooted ; dey vill do better next time.' All young soldiers — New Zealanders included — need to be 'a little shooted ' before they get definitely beyond the stage of ' funk ' and become cool under fire. Whitman's Imperial Germany tells how, in the Franco- Prussian war, German troops had sometimes to be prodded into battle with the points of their officers' swords. And Count d'Herisson, in his Journal dun Officier d'Ordonnance, records how his men were thoroughly cowed at the battle of Villiers Champigny by a deafening hurrah from an advancing line t)f German sharpshooters. Again : officers and soldiers come to know that it is good for both not merely to be ' shooted a little ' but to die a little occasionally as well. Lives are not squandered aimlessly, but the object of fighting is to win, and ir necessary the warm blood will be made to

flow in torrents. Thus, the Germans sacrificed 6000 out of their rß,ooo Guards in the terrible massacre on the smooth glacis of St. Privat ; the British 3000 out of 10,000 at Badajos, and 2487 out of 7464 officers and men at Inkerman. The dead, of course, are • out of it ' ; ' but,' says Archibald Forbes, ' their death does not discourage, but hardens their comrades. It seems brutal to write in this strain, but is not war all brutal ? And this is the solid truth.' It is a hideous thing to reflect that the habitual coolness of discipline does not come till the young soldier has learned time and again to see the red blood flow and the struck men go down. Only when that comes to pass will the New Zealand contingent feel the passion of battle and — in old Havelock's phrase — will see with tolerable equanimity the colour of the enemy's moustache and look calmly into the barrel of a levelled Mauser.

LOPPING THE TALL POPPIES.

There is a deep pathos in the report of the casualties at the battle of Glencoe (Natal) which the military press censor at the Cape has permitted to filter through to the outside world : IO British officers killed to 35 of the rank and file, and 30 officers wounded to 150 of the rank and file. The explanation given is that Tommy Atkins followed his drill-master's instructions, which impress upon him the importance of availing himself of every scrap of cover. The officers — in order to encourage their men — stood up and made themselves so many targets for the Boer marksmen. Life is sweet, human nature is weak, and it requires both nerve and grit to stand up full square and look in the face of an enemy that holds a reputation as a dead shot, and, with a friendly boulder at hand, to hold your head aloft and defiant in the fiendish air-torture that screams and whistles about your ears on a modern battlefield. Of all the sounds of battle the most disconcerting and demoralising is said to be that of shrapnel-shells. In a hard-fought fight of big dimensions they fill the air and come shrieking along like black demons, with an unearthly yell that makes even the pluckiest officers instinctively duck their heads at times and disposes their men to hug the shelter of rock or tree or friendly wall and ' lie it out.' A surgeon in the SpanishAmerican war tells a story illustrative of the demoralising effects of shrapnel fire upon the average private. It was during the battle of El Caney. He was standing in front of the hospital tent near which two wounded coloured trooper; lay. A big shrapnel-shell wound past with a demoniacal yell. Whereupon one trooper said to the other: ' I don't care for dem Mauser bullets, for when you hear one of 'em you know it's done gone past. But I sho'ly would like to know where de cannon is dat shoots dem camp-kettles full o' rocks ! '

Undue exposure of their bodies to the enemy's fire, the more striking colours or adornments of their uniform, the nature of their work, and the well-known policy of lopping off the taller poppies in battle, has usually led to a higher relative mortality among officers than among men in almost every war. Thus, in the campaign of Sadowa, in 1866, the Prussians had one officer killed or wounded for 21 men, and the Austrians one for 18 men. In the Franco-German war of 1870-1871 the minimum German force in the field was 781,000 in August, 1870, and the maximum 937,000 in February, 187 1. The medium strength was 888,000 men in the field. Of these 44,750 died, including 26,900 killed in action. The relatively greater percentage of deaths among officers may be seen by the following figures of the death-rate for the whole campaign which we take from Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics for the present year :—: — Per 1000 Per 1000 Engineers ... ... 17-6 Staff ... ... 105-0 Cavalry ... ... 271 Captains ... ... 870 Artillery ... ... 27 2 All officers ... ... 76*0 Infantry ... ... 52-8 Officers and men ... 45*9 Thus, the infantry suffered exactly three times as much as the engineers, and nearly twice as much as the cavalry and the artillery. But the unfortunate staff died just twice as much for their country, in proportion to their numbers, as did the linesmen — all ranks included. If the politicians who make the wars died relatively just twire as much as the staff during the course of a war, the cannon would roar and the Lebel and Mauser and Lee-Metford rifles give tongue and the sabre smite less frequently than they do.

It is a sheer waste of precious time and A hawke's bay Useful energy to argue with some people — at scribe. least with a view to convince them. You may pile Ossas of flawless reasoning on Helions of adamantine fact, but to what purpose ? You will convince unprejudiced hearers or readers ; but good, solid, moss-grown prejudice, especially when backed by ignorance, as it usually is, will neither see the fact nor listen to the reasoning, or, if it does, it is only to lose its nasty temper over them. What, for instance, is the use of arguing with the man who stoutly maintains that there are no gold-fields in California because gold is found only in New Zealand and Australia ?

Or with that interesting patient in a certain lunatic asylum who fancied himself a corpse ? A well-meaning doctor who knew not lunatics conceived the idea of curing him of his whim and stopped him suddenly one day. ' You're a corpse ? ' ' Yes.' ' Very well. Now, tell me : can a corpse bleed ? ' The lunatic promptly replied : ' No.' The doctor as promptly stripped the patient's arm and gave it a gash with his lancet. The red blood coursed freely down. The doctor was triumphant. ' That,' said he, pointing to the blood, ' proves you're not a corpse, for you've just said a corpse can't bleed.' 'It only proves that a corpse can bleed,' said the lunatic. And he went his way more convinced than ever that his insane folly was the highest wisdom.

No. There is no use in reasoning with lunatics nor with bigots nor with confirmed faddists nor with cranks. They are all more or less akin. And there is no use arguing with the man or old woman or boy or hobbledehoy who from time to time is permitted by the Hawke's Bay Herald to inflict upon a long-suffering public leading articles dealing with Catholic subjects — of which, by the way, he knows as little as he does of good manners, and as much as Paul Kruger's rudest burgher does about the binomial theory or the constitution of the Hertz waves. In Dr. Johnson's words, you may give him an argument, you cannot give him understanding — for when you come to his pet lunacy the hardest-hitting fact and the best inference will fall off his armour-plated intellect as that inexperienced young doctor's argumentum ad hominem did off the turret-head of the man who thought himself a living corpse. Here it is not enough to merely anoint the eye with eye-salve. It is a case of what Carlyle calls • thick, serene opacity, thicker than amaurosis ' which veils the eyes to truth. Nib-twisters of this class are a calamity in a district. They frequently compel controversy — which is entered upon not with any view to convince or silence them, but as an appeal to persons having a sense of manliness and fair play. But perpetual or frequent controversy against direct calumny or sneaking innuendo is a condition of things that ought not to be forced upon any section of the community. On the one hand, rampant and offensive calumny of the kind we refer to cannot be allowed to range quite free and unchecked without endangering the rights and consciences of Catholics and creating and fostering a hostile feeling against them that might easily end in a long lease of sectarian bitterness and strife. And on the other hand over-frequent controversy — even in defence of the most elementary personal and religious rights — tends to exasperate. The intemperate scribbler who is responsible for forcing Catholics into this position is doing the devil's work of stirring up sectarian animosity. He deserves to be drummed out of decent society, and the newspaper that makes itself his sounding-horn should be kicked out of every Catholic house. The remedy in all such cases lies with Catholics themselves.

'OUR BOASTED SYSTEM ' CONDEMNED.

Guyau, the French poet-philosopher, was no Christian. He was simply a hard-headed utilitarian. But in his Education and Heredity he has no hesitation in frankly giving- the first place in order of value and in order of treatment to the moral education of children. Even old Socrates, pagan though he was, taught practically the same lesson over two thousand years ago : that in order to prevent instruction from becoming a weapon in the hands of crime, it was necessary to allot a far larger share in education to the moral than to the intellectual and scientific instruction of the little Greeks ot his far-off day. Primary instruction is intended for the masses that constitute the very foundation of the nation. This instruction has, therefore, to act favourably on the deeplying human strata of the country. Von Humboldt expressed the idea in happy terms in his great saying : ' Whatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a nation must be first introduced into its schools.' In Montesquieu's phrase, it is here that we have greater need of heads that are ' well-formed ' than of heads that are ' well-filled.' In other words, the good of the colony demands, above all, that our children rise up with their hearts in the right place. The religion of a boy is as that of a man — to learn the religious truth he is to believe, the moral duty he is to do, and to care much and always for both. Education is worthless if we leave this side of it neglected. And, as the late head-master of Clifton College says, this cannot be effectively done unless the great moral and religious ideas come, and come constantly, ' within the sphere of ordinary school education.'

The report of the Select Committee on the Young Persons Protection Bill furnishes the Auckland Star with a text for a lengthy editorial homily on some of the follies and shortcomings of the State system of public instruction. The writer fails to put his finger on the radical evil that lies deep in the system ; but here is how he scratches some of the gilding off its surface :—: — ' Scores of parents,' says the Star, ' appear to think that because the State has provided free schools it has relieved them

of all responsibility in the training of their own children. It is no doubt a serious charge to lay against our boasted system of education, but there is no denying the fact that it has in many cases weakened the sense of paternal or maternal duty among many who, had they been obliged to provide for the secular education of their children, would have shown a greater concern for the general training of the young people outside the school. The results of this indifference on the part of parents are infinitely more dangerous and far-reaching than they themselves imagine. Their children are left unprotected from whatever malign influence may haunt their surroundings. Whatever of an evil or objectionable character is to be found in school life, they are to a very large extent at the mercy of it. The discipline of the school and the influence of the teachers are the only counter forces which the child, deprived of home guidance, has to protect him against temptation. And that must be a very partial and, in most cases, inadequate protection indeed. The authority of the teacher rarely extends beyond the class-room. In the play-ground and out of school hours the pupils are free to choose their own associates, whose habits and conversation must inevitably have much to do in the moulding of their characters. The teachers can exercise no control over the choice of companionship, and where the parents make no attempt to do so it must depend on chance or the good natural instincts of the child if he escapes the risk of being contaminated by whatever evil is in the air.'

Now this is all very pretty. But the Star leader-writer conveniently forgets or ignores a few solid and ugly-looking facts that lie at the root of the troubles which he deplores in such mellifluous phrase. In the first place, the State has been for long years busily engaged in training white children — last year some 130,000 — to pass a considerable portion of their life rigidly shut off, as with an iron door, from all thought of, or reference to, God or moral obligations. A big percentage of these are now the very fathers and mothers whom the Star writer belabours with a damaged jack-straw simply because many of them have succeeded all too well in assimilating the principles that underlie a system of instruction which has, in effect, flung the idea of God, and, with Him, of moral responsibility, over the school fence. It is at the present moment doing the same evil work for another goodly percentage of the fathers and mothers of the future. Very many State-educated parents and children, of course, fully recognise their religious and social obligations. But this is despite of, and not because of, the system under which they have been instructed. It is all very well to lament the loss of control over children. Teachers in Catholic schools have little complaint to make on that score. The average State-school teacher is, we presume, an average teacher and nothing more, if nothing less. But the Star writer ought not to need the practical reminder that even an average teacher in an atmosphere that breathes of religion has a more complete control over the conduct of children than a more than average one can have among surroundings from which the eternal groundwork principles of faith, morality, personal duty and responsibility, and obedience to constituted authority, are as rigidly excluded as if they were germs of the bubonic plague. A Professor of Common Sense is sadly needed in the offices of some of our leading secular contemporaries.

SO FRENCH, YOU KNOW.

Baboo English, Italian German, and French spoken by a Spanish cow, are all very well in their own modest way. But the printed copy of a French despatch that was recently sent out by our local governing body to all the other Parliaments in the British Empire is supreme and unapproachable in its kind. Much of the so-called ' French ' despatch — as it issued from the Government Printing Office —is unintelligible. The miraculous stupidities of the rest must be seen to be appreciated. The perpetrator of this official blunder — or rather squirming mass of blunders — has succeeded in libelling the educational status of our legislators throughout the length and breadth of the empire on which the sun refuses to set. He deserves a monument — with the Ballance statue ' artist ' to chisel it.

A perusal of some of our Government printing-house French recalls to mind a story told by Justin McCarthy in his recently published Reminiscences. The story runneth thus :—: — •When Prince Napoleon put into the Port of Cork, the city was presided over by a chief magistrate who was especially proud of his knowledge of French. Indeed, it was said that this respectable mayor had a way of oppressing his less highly cultured fellow-townsmen by an anxiety to parade his mastery of the French of Paris. The mayor suggested that a public reception should be given to Prince Napoleon. The ceremony was duly arranged, and Prince Napoleon appeared at the right time. Then his worship the mayor stepped forward and delivered a long and eloquent address, spoken without the help of any manuscript, in what the bystanders assumed to be the native tongue of the

illustrious visitor. Prince Napoleon listened. When the address was over he delivered his reply in the most correct and fluent English. In his opening sentences he thanked the meeting for the generous reception given to him, and the Mayor of Cork for the speech to which he had just listened. He expressed the most kindly and generous sentiments of welcome ; but he added his deep regret that, as he never had had an opportunity ot studying the noble Irish language, he was not able to follow the words of the worthy chief magistrate.'