OUR MERCANTILE MARINE

Taihape Daily Times, 6 November 1917, Page 4

OUR MERCANTILE MARINE

Month after month, says a writer in the Globe, Professor Delmar, interned in Ruhleben, saw our British “seamen go squelching past my barracks in columns of four on their daily halfmile tramp for a basin of coffee, and I have still in my ears the spirited f rhythmical clank, clank of their wooden clogs over the ice and frozen mud in the first war winter. They were a rough, hard-bitten, weather-beaten band, these inarticulate men of our mercantile marine, whose hearts were staunch, the most British of British, in the camp. ‘There they said a Nottingham man to mW .one day as they passed. ‘No pro-Germans among the lot, thank the Lord!’ If you treat ’em fair they’ll storm hell for you,* but let ’em once get it into their heads that they’re not being sqjjprely dealt with, and you’re right up agin it!”’