Men and Merinos

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 61, 23 August 1940, Page 5

Men and Merinos

score last week when he sneered at the "fighting will" of the retreating British troops in Egypt. It will be remembered that Mr. Duff Cooper was very rude to the Italian troops the day after Italy entered the war, and that Mr. Churchill was not exactly flattering to the Italian navy before or after the pitiable battle of Oran. But Signor Gayda doesn’t know his job. It is no use telling his S IGNOR GAYDA was working off an old countrymen that the British are retreating. — They must be presented on the run, a broken army fleeing in caporettish terror, or Italy — will not understand. Nor does Signor Gayda know the risk he is taking. The troops in Egypt come from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and India, as well as from the United Kingdom itself. Of the New Zealanders we shall say nothing. Signor Gayda may have heard the whoops of delight they gave when Italy’s entry was flashed on a Cairo screen; but whether he did or did not they are our own poor country lads, and we shall not boast about them. We shall say nothing about the South Africans or the Indians. But does Signor Gayda know that the Australians, partly because they drink strong tea all day with cooked meat, and partly because they suffer from sheep madness — a terrible disease induced by confinement on a_ sea-girt continent with millions upon millions of bland-faced Merinos-no sooner get out of their country than they "look for somebody to clip across the jaw"? We are not exaggerating. We are quoting one of the profoundest social _historians of the age, Mr. D. B. Wyndham Lewis, who has put it on record that although Australians, when they have been severed long enough from sheep, do become genial and harmless, they begin as "a flock of ramping Devils fresh from the Pit." And as Mr. Lewis points out, those in Egypt and Palestine are only recently "liberated from their ovine hell," so that the world will be "hearing from them." Signor Gayda has, of course, little knowledge of sheep. Italy is richer in goats, But if he had read Wyndham Lewis, he would have known that to be imprisoned on a farm in the back-blocks with sheep for one’s daily and sole companions, induces such a blind and savage malignancy that the Devil himself would be invited to "mix it" if he drew near.