THE TIMELY JOKE

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5301, 14 January 1947, Page 7

THE TIMELY JOKE

(J "By Crikey, we made the Germans run in Greece — but they couldn't catch us!" How often was that time-worn joke cracked in barracks, tents, on battlefields and in pubs? How often did Kiwi, Aussie and Tommy, hounded out of the southern Balkans in those dark and dismal days of 1941 by a vastly superior enemy, unconsciously turn his defeat into a victory cracking similar jokes? Did he know that it was at the moment of telling that he beat the Axis — more surely than he ever beat him on the battlefields of Libya, Tripoli, Italy, France and finally Germany?

The rout of the B.E.F. in Norway in April, 1940, of another B.E.F. in France in July of the sanie year, Greece in April, 1941, and Crete a month later, and finally the greatest rout of all — the folding baclc of the British line in the Western Desert to Alamein — what did they mean to the Allied soldier? Did three years >of reverses and 'ignominious rout mean that the squaddy was beaten-? Soldiers of the British CommonAvealth possess a quality that 'no •other soldier in the world possesses — a nebulous, but none the less real attribute, lcnown as a sense of humour. It was this puckish twist that enabled men, faced with nothdng but the prospect of calamity, to make' light of the situation and even m'S.ke themselves ridiculous in the process — • to transform themselves into a James Thurbian figure flavoured with Mark Twain and Stephen Leacock — and thus gain ascendancy over the Gerry who took himself and his victories so very seriously. I remember, just as every man who wears a returned service badge will recall, incidents when thdngs weren't going right. I remember lying wrapped round a very small bush on an exposed hill face in northern Greece while 20 Stukas divebo'inbed and machine-gunned the area. I remember a very large and very stolid Kiwi pal of mine who was wrapped round the other half of the bush. I remember an anti-personnel bomb landing far too close for comfort and I recall convulsively lashing out with my number 10's and eodlecting him in the face. "Hell!" he said, reproachfully, "you might have lathered me first!"