Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 12 August 1915, Page 21

Current Topics

■ "—"~~ —... ■. m ' j- ™ .. . Who.?: and When? *\ - ' -- V- ~. : .The following lines from the Publishers' Weekly, Now York, do not strike a particularly lofty level as poetry, but they certainly give expression to the one thought which is surging in the minds of men in every part of the planet; :' Why are you vainly urging us to buy Such books as "Who Began the War and Why 1" We want some author with prophetic pen To tell us "Who Will End the War and When!"/ Jesuits Not • In Disguise Under this apt and happy caption the New York Freeman's Journal points out that the Jesuits are not 'in disguise' at the trenches in the great war, where every post is a post of deadly danger. Figures noted by the Catholic Times show that the famous Order ' has 564 of its members under arms. Thirty-five have been killed, sixty wounded, and seventeen made prisoners. Seven are missing, five .have been made Chevaliers of- the Legion of Honor, five have received the military medal, one the medal for infirmarians, and twenty-seven have been cited in the Orders of the Day.'' But the Jesuits at the front have spiritual achievements to their credit that are more deserving of honor than even their military courage and prowess. Details from Jesuit sources and extracts from private letters written by Jesuits with the French army are published in America of June 26, and they bear witness to the already widely noted revival of religion among all classes and to the worthy and noble part played by the Jesuits in bringing about this great return to Christian faith. ' Not a complaint, not a discordant note, and above all, none of those anti-religious demonstrations which were so painful in 1870/ writes a chaplain in the North. 'ln 1870 at the sight of a soutane they would have cried out " Les cures, sac an dos !" An enormous number have come to confession.' Retreats for the soldiers, says America, are' fairly common, and more than once the soldierpriests ' have brought an apostolate into -villages where religion had almost died.' ' Men's bodies are being horribly mutilated,' writes. Pere Cavrois, now an airman and an officer in the English service, ' but untold good is being done in their souls.' One hospital chaplain reports that out of forty-five deaths within a certain period, onlv four were without the Sacraments, and of these four, two were German Lutherans. Many conversions have been recorded ; ' it is well to-carry a bottle of clear water for baptisms,' says a chaplain. Equally consoling are the stories of 'second Communions,' i.e., returns to the Sacraments for the first time since childhood. These 'returns' often include officers with large numbers of their commands. Before the war is over, the much abused and much persecuted sons of Loyola will be spoken of with respect even in ultra-Protestant circles. The Prospects in the Trentino We are all amateur strategists and artillerists nowadays; and the great outstanding lesson of the war has been so strongly and repeatedly emphasised during the past twelve months that even an intelligent schoolboy could probably make an approximately accurate answer . to the question, What will Italy accomplish The answer would be, of course, that all will depend on her command of heavy ordnance and high explosives. The Austrian defensive position is an immensely strong one ; but Italy has had ten months of preparation, and her military authorities must long ago have been seized of the fact that the one hope of reducing the formidable permanent works of the enemy lies in being able to direct against them a tornado of high explosive shells. As Mr. Hilaire Belloc, writing in the New York American, puts it, 'the heavy piece decides.'

■"' ' 'Will Italy find herself,' Mr. Belloc asks, in !" a position to force the permanent - works round Trent? They will resist for- months, just as Przemysl resisted for months, unless j there is brought against them- in great numbers' the heavy mobile' howitzer and with it masses of munition. That modern instrument of war, supplied for even fortyeight hours with an uninterrupted stream of projectiles and charges, will, as we know, dominate most permanent works. In a-week or ten days it will dominate any permanent work. Five days nearly did for Troyon ; ten days entirely did for Manonvilliers; rather more than a week for the permanent works of Maubeuge; a day or two for Antwerp and a few hours for Namur. But in the absence of the weapon and its provision the permanent work resists indefinitely. " The lesson is such a simple one, it was so early seized by the French General staff, it is so clearly the great tactical issue of the campaign, that one is almost ashamed to insist on it again. The heavy piece decides. And what the fortunes of Italy may be in the next few days or weeks is a question almost certainly to be answered in the words that answer the question of Russian resistance upon tho line of the San and the supreme question about what fate will attend tho ultimate offensive in the West. Tt is the answer to the question why the Germans swept Galicia, as they did. It will be more and more the answer to every remaining problem in this. war. Given the proportion of heavy guns, and of shell between two combatants at such and such a critical moment (and shell in the case of heavy pieces nearly always means, of course, high explosive shell) and you can with fair certainty predict the result.- The Italian State has had mouths of preparation. She has had the time to produce hew heavy artillery pieces in great number. Her engineers are the most skilful in the world : her modern industrial power in the North is formidable indeed. Whether full use has been made of all the opportunities thus present, particularly in this crucial matter of the heavy gun, the immediate future alone can show.' As Germans See It What would it mean, on the larger'and wider outlook, if Germany were victorious in the present struggle? It would mean that the binding power of treaties, which has already had a sufficiently hard struggle for recognition but which tended of late years to be more generally and honorably acknowledged, would have no longer even a formal existence ; that Hague" Conventions and Geneva Conventions, having for object to regulate the conduct of war and to secure sonic mitigations of its essential inhumanity, would become mere farce ; that all the efforts made to provide safe-guards for peace and to promote goodwill between the people have been lost and trodden under foot; that the principles which alone serve to redeem war from savagery—honor, good faith, humanity, justice —had been thrown to the winds, and that the principles that the State is the highest power, that superior force is the best of all possible reasons, and that in time of stress anything and everything are permissiblethe | poison gas, the poisoned well, the flame projector, and the sinking of hundreds of innocent women and children without giving them any chance to escapewould become enthroned. In a word, so. far as the humane conduct of war and the relations of nation to nation are concerned, our civilisation would be in the dust. ■* '' _ Yet, strangely enough, the Germane and their friends manage to persuade themselves, and then proclaim loudly to the world, that in the present conflict Germany is the champion of civilisation. Here is a picture from a German point of view of what Germany's victory, would mean. In this world war,' says the International, of New York, ' Germany supplies the great dynamic force of evolution. Her victories and . achievements will widen the range of opportunity for her people. Upon her success depends the freedom of Islam and the regeneration of Turkey under the enlightened government of the Young Turks. * Every-

where her victory will mean what it means in her. own land, industrial and civic .-progress,, religious liberty, \ education and culture, and 'whether victorious or defeated, her dazzling manifestation of efficiency in every department of national life cannot fail to stimulate other nations to similar high achievements in their Social and political adjustments.' Even Germany's hatred of England "is to -be taken as a mark and _ expression of her superior civilisation. 'Germany's violent hatred of England expresses her senso of rebellion against hypocrisy, her deep-rooted disgust and haughty contempt, for national selfishness, for narrow insularism and all that is reactionary in social organisation. Hers is the love of enterprise, the habit*of energy and boldness, the reaction against a hitherto static and decadent Europe. Germany knocks at the door of the twentieth century. England, allied with, barbarous Russia,. bars the way and would drive her back into the eighteenth.' * A similar contempt for non-German civilisation is embodied in a recent pictorial German post-card, a copy of which lies before us-. The English translation is as folio: ' My name is Tommy Atkins And I'm a husky chap, My oomrade is a Cossack And my partner is a Jap. We're going with some Gurkas And likewise with some Sikhs, Some black Algerian Turcos, And other colored freaks, And with all the blooming virtues For which you know we shine, We are carrying "Civilisation" To the people on the Rhine.' The skit is clever in its way, but the sarcasm is, to say the least of it, badly misdirected. The New Life-Saver If it be really true, as the cables inform us, that Dr. Alexis Carrel, the medical wizard who three years ago startled the world by the marvellous manner in which he manipulated the nerves and organs of the human anatomy, has hit upon an antiseptic combination which will make it possible completely to control the dreaded and deadly infection following upon shrapnel wounds, the discovery is, in the strictiv military sense, a greater victory than the capture of Warsaw. What it means in the saving of life and in conserving the* strength of our fighting units is almost incalculable. But let US give the full terms of the cable. ' Dr. Alexis Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute, and Mr. Henry Dakin, a chemist,' says a Paris message in Saturday's .papers, 'have discovered an ideal antiseptic, consisting of hydrochloride of lime, with the addition of boric acid as-a preservative and of carbonate of lime to counteract the acidity. Professor Landaus}*, lecturing at the Academy of Sciences, said. that in a series of experiments at Compiegne Hospital it was applied to the most frightful wounds, and within eight days the aspect of the wounds modified in a way ouite unknown under flic old antiseptics. Tf it is applied in time the infection of the wounds may be considered impossible.' If this claim can be made good, one of the greatest and gravest difficulties with which our surgeons have had to contend, as a result of the excessive use of artillery in. the present war, has been overcome. Roughly speaking, the three main causes of disablement from which our men have suffered in Franco and Flanders have been tetanus." (or lockjaw), the so-called frost-bite, and severe mutilating shrapnel wounds. The occurrence of the first named complication was almost entirely local, and was so distinctly confined to a particular area of the fighting that the region was afterwards definitely and officially described as the ' tetanus belt.' The so-called frost-bite is not true frost-bite iu the ordinary acceptation of. the term, but rather a condition in which .exposure to damp and cold has effected

the nutrition .the. parts by causing neurosal or nerve changes and under . suitable : treatment- .which, by the way, a German drug, aspirin, now, happily, produced in England, plays an important part—the cases speedily recover. But the . more serious shrapnel wounds, which, as the experience of the war has proved, are invariably followed by sepsis or poisoning, have so far been practically impervious to treatment. -The virulent and pervading sepsis of the shrapnel wounds is probably caused mostly by the infective nature of the bullets which the shell contains. In this respect the man who is wounded by a rifle bullet has the advantage, for the rifle bullet is sterilised by the very velocity ofits flight. The wound from such a bullet through soft tissues may be followed by an entirely non-septic course, provided that no infective matter, such as fragments of clothing, have been carried into the wound at the time of penetration. But in the case of the shell wounds, the virulence of their septic nature is shown by the fact that they are characteristically followed by the destructive and fatal onset of which is known as spreading gangrene (or mortification). Apart from war conditions 'such a complication is extremely rare, and there are probably many surgeons now serving in the war to whom such a terrible disease is an entirely new experience. The mortality from the disease in the war has naturally been very high. In a, badly infected case, modem treatment has so far been powerless to control, the poison, and the virulence of the septic invasion causes these cases to be a source of danger to other wounded men, necessitating their isolation as a, precautionary and expedient measure. > * As wo have indicated, the success just attributed to Dr. Carrel—who, by the way, though attached to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, is a Frenchman, who made his studies in the Medical School of Lyons—is not by any means his first gnat distinction in the scientific world. Two years ago he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, in recognition of the results of a remarkable series of experiments carried out by him at the Rockefeller Institute. The object of the experiments was to keep vital organs alive after their removal from the body. In a single mass lie removed all the thoracic organs of a cat and placed them in Ringer solution at a temperature of 38 degrees centigrade.. Artificial respiration was effected by means of a rubber tube, and the stomach was supplied with food bv similar means. Under these conditions life was maintained in the organs for 10, 11, and in one case for 13 hours after their removal from the body. The beating of the heart was strong and regular, and the digestive organs and lungs worked in a normal manner. These experiments were followed by others, whose importance and possible value in the search for a cure for cancer have been thus outlined by Professor J. B. Tingle in the New York Independent: 'lt having been thus proved that organs may be removed from the body and kept "potentially alive" for weeks, a further step naturally suggests itself. Can such organs be caused to grow outside the body? The most recent work of Drs. Carrel and Burrows answers the question in the affirmative'. Portions of tissue were removed from warm-blooded animals immediately after death. The tissue was sealed up, kept at the temperature of the body from which it was taken, and supplied with "food." This food consisted of liquid squeezed from the body of the same.animal: it is termed "plasma." Under these conditions, after a time, the tissue began to grow. Often its growth was much more rapid than it would have been had the tissue remained undisturbed in the animal's body, because in its new environment it was getting much more food than it would have obtained normally. As the tissue grew the new parts resembled the parent ones. Cartilage grew cartilage, fragments of kidney grew cells such as are found only in kidney, portions of spleen reproduced the pulpy material such as is present in that organ. When some o? the newly-grown tissue" was removed and placed separately, with fresh plasma, it continued to grow just

as before. .It: did not require the parent tissue to direct it. • It follows, therefore, that it is possible to grow generations of cells outside the body from which the original tissue has been taken. These experiments open up an important new field for investigation and furnish a new weapon of extreme value to those engaged in the fight with cancer. The skilled worker can now actually follow with his eye the reproduction of cancer cells, and, by varying the conditions and the food which is supplied to his cancerous material, he may hope to discover the factors which help and those which hinder its growth.' From all of which it would seem fairly evident that a new star has risen in the scientific world, and one not unworthy of the land which produced Pasteur.