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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 5, No. 5. July 2, 1942

[sub-subsection]

"Breathes there the man with soul so dead." ... So chanted two of us on the deck of a home-bound ship two days out from Suva. One of the advantages of a Varsity education is that it leaves one with an impressive collection of tags and quotations, laboriously assimilated for the delusion of examiners, wherewith to furish the ready quip or the cynic paraphrase.

I am to tell of Fiji, the Isle where Romance Still Lives, the Tropic Playground, as the posters planted it before the eyes of the troops. What the troops said doesn't matter. Romance was rare, but beauty there was, and all the rich colour of the tropics: lofty palms in dark silhouette against a rising moon and a silver sea; the deep blue of tropic waters cut by the creamy-white line where the reef meets the eternal Pacific rollers; Indian women in bright-hued [unclear: saris], tilling the lands by methods old when the Pharoahs ruled the Nile; the incredible green of paddy-fields; beauty enough for those that have eyes to see, and whose soul is not too sickened with heat and labour to enjoy.

They were a good crowd, those chaps. Drawn from all walks of life, they were moulded into a curious uniformity that is the product of the Army. One doesn't realise their essential decency until one is sick or "down to it." The little shy kindnesses and elaborately casual offers that flock in spontaneously from all sides are testimony enough.