THE MYSTERY OF WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 December 1915, Page 3

THE MYSTERY OF WAR.

FROM TARANAKI TO G ALICIA. LINK ACROSS THE WORLD. NEW ZEALANDER'S IMPRESSIONS. A very interesting reverie on the war appears in the Daily Chronicle from the pen of its Petrograd correspondent, Dr Harold Williams, a New Zealander. The following extracts carry the thread along:—"I thought last night of a little deserted church on the hillside in Hungary, and I thought of a little chapel on a hill under the shadow of a high mountain in New Zealand. The church in Hungary was a queer, forlorn little building, with crevices in its creaking timbers, with grey paint pealing from its walls, with long moss-grown props sustaining its decrepitude. One window was broken, and a cold breeze stealing in kept up a troubled napping in the tawdry array of the church banners, The altar doors were open, and on the. altar lay a silver chalice and a Slavonic prayer-book, printed in Lvov in the eighteenth century. Near it lay a copv of a Papal Bull in Latin, affirming the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. The church was a Uniate Church, with Eastern ritual and Papal dogmas. But the priest had gone, and the Ruthonian worshippers had all fled. "The saints on the walls looked down on a few Russian soldiers who had met for choir practice. War overshadowed the valley. A line of water-logged Austrian trenches ran* along the crest of the hill, above the vhureh. The scream of shells pierced the air over the hilltops. From somewhere in the west came the sudden hoarse bark of the Austrian heavy guns. The little church was desolate. The heart of its devotion had gone out of it. It stood limp before God. A LITTLE CHAPEL IN NEW ZEALAND. "That little chapel in New Zealand is happy, I thought, to be spared this; happy because the dairy farmers still gather there on 'Sunday afternoons, and sing slow hymns to the accompaniment of a wheezy, harmonium, and listen to a preacher easily and confidently dispensing the comforts of Heaven. But, perhaps, there is more effort in the preaching now, more passion in the prayers. Even into that far peace, the unrest of the war has entered. The New Zealanders are at the Dardanelles, A link is being forged between the little Uniate Church and that New Zealand chapel. "Down by the shores of the Aegean Sea a conscript from the Carpathian village and a farmer's son from under the shadow of Mount Egmont may meet in battle, and in battle die. One and the same sorrow will pass northward over the mountains to the little Uniate Church, and fly far southward over the ocean to the chapel on the hill; and over both church and chapel will heavily hang the shadow of the same aching mystery. When shall we pierce it? THE MAORIS' PART. "It seems incredible. What have Maoris to do with Russian national aspirations? The men who most firmly believed that the hope of Russia was bound up with the freedom of the straits were called Slavophil. When those grave thinkers in long winter evenings in the snowbound stillness of their estates gave solemn words to their hope and vision, could they possibly have dreamed that in the struggle for its realisation a Maori called Ngamu would die? "Trace the mystery farther still. Ngamu and Waihia and Te Tahu and their brave company were killed by the Turns. The Turks could not have known that these men whom they believed to be vnnnibals were fighting for that greater liberty in the name of which they themselves had once risen and overthrown Abdul Hamid. "One summer evening I was crossing the Sea of Marmora from Constantinople to the Princes'' Islands with Hussein .Tabid Bey, the editor of the Young Turkish Tanin. The sun had just set, the islands and the hills were hushed into soft dreaming, and there was happiness in tue long, gentle heaving of the darklyshining waters. 'There is one sight like this in all the world,' I said, 'and tk-at is Auckland Harbor, in New Zealand, with the Hauraki Gulf.' ONCE THE TURKS' IDEAL. "Jahid Bey started at the mention of New Zealand. 'Why, New Zealand was once our ideal,' he said. And then he told me how he and Javid Bey and other friends had, when they were very young, planned to escape from the. tyranny of Abdul Hamid and found a Young Turkish commune in New Zealand, the home of freedom. The plan broke down, as a similar plan of Coleridge's and Sonthey's did. The young Turks stayed on in Constantinople. They overthrew Abdul Hamid. But they blundered ino the German alliance, which forced them to fight in the Dardanelles against the men of the land to which once they had looked for deliverance. "Who can unravel the tangled skein? Shadows pass, voices call. From the upper windows of a Maori college a song comes pealing out into the night. The boys are lying in the darkness and liftfng up a mighty chorus. "'He rongo pai te ornnga, he hari mo te ao,' they sing. It is a hymn, hut they make it sound like a battle-cry. "The war will end some day. We shall, perhaps, mould our earthly arrangements into a little closer conformity with the unceasingly disturbing ideal of liberty. And the Maoris will go home wondering." ,