Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 10, 6 March 1902, Page 1

Current Topics

The Seventh. We tender our sincere sympathy to the relatives of the New Zealanders, and especially of those of the household of the faith, who were killed or wounded in the recent disaster to the Seventh Contingent. History Repeated. History, like the fashion in skirts and mantles and headgear, has a habit of repeating itself. For some time past news From the seat of war in South Africa has occasionally recorded the use, by the Boers, of goaded cattle in stormtng positions or in breaking through! wire entanglements or living cordons. Such a stratagem led to the lamented death of so many young New Zealanders a few days ago. It is an old, and by no means ineffectual ruse de guerre. A somewhat similar piece of military strategy is recorded in Roman history. In Ireland it was set in operation as far back as the twelfth century, when Strongbow and his mailclad Anglo-Normans invaded the country, on conquest bent. Six centuries later the idea was acted upon, at the suggestion of Father John Murphy, by the Irish insurgents of 1798 in their attack upon the town of Enniscorthy. A* herd of cattle was driven at a furious pace by a picked body of agile pikemen against the strong position held by the king's troops at the Duffry Gate. It was a furious onset. The maddened cattle struck the soldiers with the impact of a thundering regiment of heavy cavalry and threw their ranks into confusion. In an instant the pikemen were among them, slaying with the most terrible weapon that had up to that time been used at close quarters in war, and the troops were in full flight. Bayonet and musket-ball both failed to stop the maddened charge of the horned and riderless ' cavalry ' of the insurgents of 1798. The hollow square, with its 'breakers' foam ' of bayonets, was, till the appearance of the magazine rifle, considered an unfailing protection against charging cavalry, although it failed in the case of some of the British squares at Waterloo. Once during the Peninsula war (it was, we think, at Fuentes d'Onoro), a battalion of British infantry, extended in line, beat off a cavalry charge. In the Franco-German war, during the ' sweeping movements ' that ended in Sedan, a splendidly disciplined line of Prussian infantry, in skirmishing order, drove off with schnellfeuer or rapid volleying from their needle-guns three separate waves of rushing horsemen. It was, we think, the first time in military history that such a feat was performed, and it excited the unbounded admiration of ' Fighting' Phil Sheridan, who witnessed it from his place among the Prussian headquarters staff. The magazine rifle has made regular cavalry charges against unbroken ranks of armed men, even in South Africa, a thing of the past. And the recent experience of the Seventh New Zealanders in South Africa has gone to show that it can even stop the more furious rush of maddened cattle..

Moving Romewards. The ' Romeward movement ' seems to be quietly percolating through Anglicanism to the other denominations. Within

the past fortnight the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church o* New Zealand reported, in effect, that he had recently witnessed a number of what we may call ' ritualistic ' ceremonies among his co-religionists in British Columbia that filled him with rank surprise. But that is not all. ' A Boston newspaper,' says the Aye Maria, ' notes the growing desire among all religious bodies in this country " to give greater dignity to public worship." Surpliced choirs, it tells us, are rapidly becoming popular with Methodists and Lutherans ; sectarian churches adhere more faithfully to the traditional styles of ecclesiastical architecture; and "many churches keep Lent that never -Jiept it before." But it is not in this country alone that the change has been noted. For some years the growth of "ritualistic practices " in Germany has been a standing grievance of Dr. Adolph Harnack ; in England the use of incense and lights has long incensed the lights of old-fashioned Protestantism ; and even in Scotland (Archbishop Eyre, of Glasgow, informs us) " the Presbyterians are developing Catholic ideas and practices." Statues of the saints have been set up in the empty niches of St. Giles' — empty since the days when John Knox thundered against Rome in that very cathedral— and a stone altar has replaced the old Communion-table. The "four bare walls and a preaching-tub " are no longer thought sufficient furnishing for the kirk, according to the Glasgow Observer; and the " kist o' whussles," as Knox called the organ, is restored to its old place of honor.'

Well, the prodigalsare evidently getting tired of the husks of religion and are working their way back to their Father's House again.

Exit Cordite. The War Office is probably the best abused institution in the British Isles. And the common lack of sympathy with it arises from the fact that it deserves most of the censure that it gets. Some dyspeptic writer once said that it would take a hangman to get a young Briton to study. It would probably take a regiment of hangmen to keep the War Office up to date. Moore makes a poetic youth say to a maiden among the roses of an old-fashioned garden : If we could do with this world of oara What thou dost with thy garden bowera, Reject the weeds and keep the flowers, What a heav'n on earth we'd make it I Judicious weeding — wise acceptance and rejection — do not, however, seem to have, at any time during the past hundred years, characterised the conduct of the War Office. For instance, it rejected sights for cannon till compelled to adopt them by the superior shooting of the Americans in 1812; it continued to use smooth-bore artillery muskets long after the other Powers had adopted rifled weapons; it turned up its lordly nose at the breech-loader, and kept the muzzle-loader in the hands of Mr. Atkins long after every nation, great and little, in Europe had abandoned it ; it rejected the VickersMaxim gun (the deadly ' pom-pom ') and a number of other improved weapons that are now in use in France and other countries ; and, among other follies of this capricious and sleepy-headed coteri* of ancients, it hugged its stock of reeky black powder, and when forced to hustle a bit and put the smokeless variety in

the cartridges of its fighting men, it, in 1889, selected, of all Others, cordite. Now cordite eats the ' innards ' out of guns, left the m )st expensive heavy artillery useless after about a hundred discharges, and has been recently condemned by a committee of experts on explosives as dangerous, expensive, and ' worse than useless.' It never occurred to the War Office to get its Explosives Committee to work before adopting Sir Frederick Abel's mixture of gun-cotton, nitro-glycerine, and vaseline. And now Mr. Brodrick, Secretary of State for War, has issued an edict prohibiting its use in the army, and the cordite works in Arklow and elsewhere have their doors closed and their shutters up, and there is want and lamentation among some odd thousands of workers.

Thereby Hangs a Tale. But thereby hangs a tale. On June 21, 1895, a halfmustered House of Commons was dozing in committee on the Army Estimates. A motion was tabled for the salary of Mr. Campbell -Bannerman, Secretary of State for War. Mr. Brodrick moved its reduction, and hacked and hewed at Mr. Campbell-Bannerman for not having in store a sufficient stock of cordite. All sorts of solemn assurances were given that Mr. Brodrick's charge was groundless. It was of no avail. A division took place. Mr. Brodrick scored by a catch majority of seven votes in a somnolent House from which half the Members were absent. This was, to all intents and purposes, a vote of censure on the Secretary of State for War. Lord Rosebery resigned the seals of office. Lord Salisbury stepped in, formed a Cabinet, and to the great astonishment of the average Briton, rewarded Mr. Brodrick with a seat in the Administration and the office of Secretary of State for War. And so Mr. Brodrick rose to place and pay on his beloved cordite. And now he has had to turn upon his best friend and — no doubt wi' a tear in his ce — sign and promulgate the sentence of its banishment as a pestiferous nuisance from the British army.

A Ponderous Genius. A cable message from Paris in last Friday's daily papers ran as follows: — 'There is a great celebiation proceeding throughout France on the occasion of the centenary of Victor Hugo. 1 Victor Hugo was a genuine genius, a word -artist of the first order, and gifted with a mind of marvellous activity. His fame, such as it is, will rest upon his poetry. The writings by which it is best known to English speaking readers are Notre Dame and Les Miserables — turgid, and pretentious works, abounding in absurdities. He was somewhat elephantine in proportions, affected, an inveterate poseur, irretrievably given to attitudinising and self-worship, and in and out of his books kept his eye for ever on the foot-lights. Innate and sedulously cultivated vanity spoiled some of his bebt work, as dyspepsia soured and poisoned Carlyle's. Victor Hugo dabbled considerably in politics, in which he was shifty and unreliable in his ponderous and elephantine way. Catholics will best remember him for his eloquent and stirring defence of Christian education in the French Chamber. He even went so far as to declare that the public prosecutor should deal with parents who would send their children to schools where religious instruction is not imparted. In his old and decadent days he veered around — after many a political volte face — to anticlericalism, and wrote against the Papacy and the Church with a pen dipped in gall and vinegar. And so he died. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike th' inevitable hour ; The paths of glory lead but to the grave. * Victor Hugo was accorded a public funeral. At his living request a pauper's hearse bore to the tomb the massive coffins that enclosed his embalmed remains. They were placed in the crypt of the Paris Pantheon, near those "of Rousseau and Voltaire, the twin prophets and high-priests of the infidelity which had added such a weight of horror to the French Revolution. And there, in 1888 — three years after his death — we saw the three big coffins covered in dust and faded vvreaths and tattered ribbons far beneath Tissot's great dome. Hugo had, at least, the grace of a decent domestic life. And, despite the venemous anticlericalism of his senile decay, it was a cruel fate that flung his remains between those of Voltaire, who was imprisoned for gross crimes against morality, and Rousseau, who, in his Confessions, admits the soft impeachment of being a cheat, liar, thief, and roue.

Fame. Horace Greely is right. Fame is a vapor; popul irity an accident. In the seventeen years that Victor Hugo has been dead, people have been very busy doing a ' sight of forgettin'.' The once burnished Victor Hugo's name and fame have been dimmed, and in due course he will, like so in my other greater and lesser lights, drop into his due perspective in the world of

letters. Victor Hugo has written enough good poetry to make him famous, even if all his prose works found their way to the rubbish-heap or the paper-mill — where many of them have already gone. Fame sometimes hangs by a little thing— that of Thomas Gray lives on the * Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,' that of Cervantes on Don Quixote, that of Rev. Charles Wolfe on the ' Lines on the Burial of Sir John More,' the curious literary history of which was told a few weeks ago in our editorial columns.

After all, fame is a relative thing. Many of our readers may have heard of the laborer who said of Huxley : ' What a stunnin 1 navvy he'd 'a made ! ' Ruskin was known to a certain class as ' the old gent wot teaches drawrin' at the Taylorian.' Among the simple folk of Haslemere, Tennyson's fame is said to have largely depended on his being a lord and wearing 'an 'at big enough for onythinV Some time ago a native of Ecclefechan spoke as follows of the ' Sage of Chelsea' to a writer in the Atlantic Monthly : ' Oh, ay, I ken the Carlyles. Tarn is a writer of books, but we do not think much of him in these parts. Jeems is the best of the family ; he sends the fattest pigs to the Dumfries market.' Jeems was the youngest brother of the Carlyles, but he was by no means disposed to look upon Tarn as the pride of the family. A gentleman was once introduced to the breeder of the fattest pigs about Dumfries, and remarked : ' You'll be proud of your great brother ? ' 'Me prood of him ! ' exclaimed Jeems in tones of emphatic contempt ; ' I think he should be prood o' me ! ' • And this is fame ! as Mr. Crummies observed.