Page 2 Advertisements Column 5

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2010, 20 February 1907, Page 2

“German troops can march to battle singing Luther’s hymns. Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy by a song of glory and of Fatherland. Our martial poets,” says A. Conan Doyle in Cassell’s Magazine,, “need not trouble to imitate ,or at least need not imagine that if they do so they will ever supply a want to the British soldier. Our sailors working the heavy guns in South Africa sang : 1 Here’s another lump of sugar for the bird.’ I saw a regiment go into action to the refrain of “A Little Bit oif the Top.’ The martial poet aforesaid unless he had the genius and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted a good deal of ink before ho had got down to such chants as these. The Russians arc not unlike us in this respect”. I remember reading of sonic column ascending a breach and singing lustiiy' from start to blush, until a few survivors were left victorious upon the crest with the song still going. A spectator inquired wliat wondrous chant it was winch had warmed them to such a deed of valor, and ho found that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was ‘lvan is in the garden picking cabbages, l ”