LONDON

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 121, 15 February 1919, Page 5

LONDON

AS SEEN BY AN AMERICAN OFFICER. I have seen London. I came up from the camp at Winchester and was astonished to pass through what seemed to be a vast extent of uncultivated country just before arriving in the city, The city was not as gloomy as I had pictured it, and the houses were very low—miles of them all alike. • To me there was too much uniformity. I went to an hotel that was as gopd as anything in America, and there were a great many good-looking women sitting around. I was surprised to find the Tower of London a little walled town of its own. The jewel collection is beyond the power of words to describe, but it looked like an easy matter to do away with the keopor. Since Elizabeth's time little seems to have happened there in tho Tower, but I guess it will alwaj'6 be one of the world's show-places. I saw no particularly prominent buildings apart from St. Paul's, but that was wonderful—especially the picture of Christ standing at the door with the lanthorn, knocking. The buildings had a dingy look, but the people were tho soul of hospitality, repeatedly going out of their way to show me around. . Westminster Abbey was a disappointment. It is bo gloomy inside and the fog drifted through the upper windows, and the dead had no privacy, tho people poking caries at the name-plates of poets .whom I loved. How much better to bo buried, on tlio hills as Cecil Rhodes was buried. I.believe I understood what tho poet meant when he said: , _ "Heroes and Kings! Your distance keep, w In peace let one poor poet sleep. I had dinner at Ye Cheshire Cheese. If Dr. Johnson over had a steak and kidnoy pie like tho one 1 had, no wonder lie could argue. It was as wonderful as tho English ale. Tho greatest thing to me in all 'England'was Hyde Park. Certainly tliero must be something fundamentally very fine and very just about tho English, or tho freedom of expression in Hyde Park could never exist. ' K man ftot on to a box and said what he believed and took all comers. 1£ lie couldn't get a box he stood flat-footed on the park sidewalk, and stated his faith in some cure for human ills. It wouldn't go in America; we are not liberal enough and we aro too selfconscious. From London and England I came over to France with my conceptions of England and the English revised. The people wero wonderfully good and kind, and how beautiful tho countryside, and how clean! , Surely the men who lie in Flanders fields for defence of that beautiful islo of England have, in dying foi< if, exercised a privilege rather than made a sacrifice—"Daily Mail."