OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 March 1943, Page 2

OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

BRITAIN & RUSSIA f <- (To the Editor.) Sir—lt is regrettable that a visiting M.P. should not have found it possible to state his own and the general admiration for Russia, in peace and war, without the clumsy dragging in of a gratuitous insult to his Majesty’s Household Brigade, which, according to Mr Atmore, “sat and watched the Battle of Britain being fought on the plains of Russia.” We had always been led to believe it was fought and won over Britain herself by our air forces against the Luftwaffe in 1940, a considerable time before the treacherous Axis attack on Russia was made, and while the inscrutable M. Stalin’s point of view had still to be ascertained. The Brigade of Guards in this and the last war, not to speak of earlier ones, has played a distinguished part, and within the last few days we have heard how the Guards came to the support of the thin line of hard-pressed American troops in Tunisia. A cheap insult of this kind can have only one object —the fostering of class ill-feeling, the Guards being known as a corps d’elite, closely associated with the Sovereign on ceremonial occasions, but of which the rank and file differ in no way from those of other regiments except in a higher standard of physique. —I am, etc., ETHEL COLLIE. Masterton, February 28.