RETICENT ENGLISHMEN

Evening Star, Issue 19664, 17 September 1927, Page 1

RETICENT ENGLISHMEN

Ask any Cockney boy for some details about the "id of liis choice, and he, whoso heart has leapt at the mention of her mime and is throbbing mightily—does he become lyrical and speak literature, as all lovers, when I hey speak with feeling, inevitably do? No. The detestable convention forbids it. He replies, “ Oh, she's not 100 bad.” Nay, I can almost hoar him replying, “ Oh, she’s nothing to Vrito home about.” Heigh-ho. How abundantly was this lawful fact illustrated in the war! (exclaims Ernest Raymond, in the London ‘.lOvouing Standard’), Your Frenchman had no hesitation in proclaiming with uplifted arm Ids love for ” la patrie.” Did a single one of our eight million men ever sulTcr on his lips the shameful word, “fatherland”? Not one. Rather did they say, after a long silence at the end of a thirty-mile march, “What do I care for (he l!ritish Umpire? I’d sell it for fivo boh.” And men wore found to laugh at this:. Your French battalions marched to battle singing the * Marseillaise,’ Was it ever heard that, an English battalion approached the one to the strains of ‘Rule, Britannia’? Heaven defend us, no! They sang ‘Who Wore You With Last Night?’ or they sang, When This Weary (?) War is Over,’ to the. melancholy tune of ‘ Ask it of (ho Lord in Prayer.’ And yet they arrived at (heir map-references no later than their allies. Your Frenchman would explain with happy volubility that he was fighting “ pour Phumanite.' Humanity! Think you an English Tommy could have had any truck with so horrid a word. Emphatically no. And yet they were the most humane soldiers on any front; I hey were the only ones who from the, lirst moment to the last could never bo taught how to hate.