And MY WAR AND MORRISON'S

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 117, 19 September 1941, Page 10

And MY WAR AND MORRISON'S

Bach Seat Blits= krieg

(Written for

i The Listener"

by

ETAOIN

6é OW if I were Budenny," said little Morrison, glaring through his spectacles, "I would throw all my mechanised units over the Dneiper now and force the Germans back along their own supply lines." To give point to his remarks, he swung his lunch-box viciously like it was a 50-ton tank he was buzzing across the Dneiper or the Peipus or what-have-you in the pious hope that it would catch Reichsgeneral von List slap on the monocle. It did catch one of the straphangers in the small of the back, but Morrison didn’t notice it. He was in full cry, mechanised units and all, after the retreating Narzis. * * * ‘THAT's just a sample of what I hear every evening. Every evening there are a million Morrisons bumping belligerently homeward in the rear compartments of a hundred thousand buses with nothing but flatulence in their tummies and their heads stuffed with the latest military jargon as churned -out by the cable services of the evening papers. Just look at Morrison, for example, physically he’s more like an Informed Circle than anything else and I doubt if he could throw out his chest, far less

a mechanised unit, but you should hear him on tactics. I never argue with him myself -if you’re a three-section commuter like me and you're up against a terminusite, or termite, like Morrison, it’s bad strategy. You can throw him back in confusion on the Pripet marshes maybe, but what’s the good of that when that’s where you get off and Morrison’s additional threepence worth of backseat is enough respite for him to dredge himself and his panzer units back on to dry land and scupper you in absentia to the entire satisfaction of his remaining cronies. You can never beat the Morrisons. There was one fourpenny single tried it last week. He threw four panzer spearheads at Morrison in as many minutes, but it was no use, Morrison just bit their heads off *and spat them back at him, Then the fourpenny tried to bend Morrison’s front line and make a Battle of the Bulge out of it but Morrison at once developed a pincer movement and the fourpenny retired so hastily that he backed up against the button-push and when the bus stopped he said that was where he got off and Morrison was left in possession of the field. F * ok BS Not that Morrison confines himself to land tactics. You should have seen him at the Battle of Taranto. Musso. hadn’t a single racing skiff left when he had finished with him. He power-dived (Continued on next page)

BACK SEAT BLITZKRIEG

(Continued from previous page) all over the place and by the time his squadrons had run out of bombs and gas and turned back to the Ark Royal most of us were under the seats or sinking rapidly. He came screeching down so realistically that for a while the busdriver thought there was a traffic cop on our tail and most of us were late in getting home. Morrison’s nothing if not versatile. He torpedoed me three times at Matapan even though I wasn’t taking sides at all. Pour encourager Jes autres, I suppose. And as for Stukas, he picks ’em off like pheasants on the first of May; bang-bang, right and left, just like that. Versatile and ubiquitous, that’s Morrison. I’ve seen him bomb Berlin, strafe the U-boats from the Western Approaches and give General Rommel a desert headache all in the space of a five-penny bus trip and for all I know after I got off he may have managed to mop up Italian Somaliland and solve the Indo-Chinese puzzle before he himself got to the end of the section. * a * BUT while he can give a good account of himself on any front and even on several fronts at once, he’s most at home

defending the sacred soil of Holy Russia. As he says, it gives him a bit of room to mancéuvre in. Remember the German motorised divisions that were reported to be thundering down the broad road to Moscow about nine weeks ago? They were never heard of again. Morrison got them. He came bustling up the road from Moscow in a fleet of three-thousand-ton tanks and creased them right out. Great fellow, Morrison, He wiped out the Fuhrer’s special division of S.S.W. Blackguards at the gates of Smolensk. Then he blew up the Dneiper Dam and without bothering to ring up Uncle Joe, either. He blew it up coming home one Friday night and the havoc that kind of blast can cause in a confined space like the back of a bus has to be seen to be believed. We nearly went off the road. Bingo! Just like that. Oh, a great fellow, Morrison, He nearly bust a blood vessel the night before last tightening the steel ring of the blockade around Germany, and last night he. was hurling munitions trains along the trans-Iranian railway. I got out just as he was roaring through Teheran amid the frantic cheers of the populace, but I’ll bet he beat Adolf to the Caspian. No doubt of it, he should be on the Allied General Staff-sometimes I wish he was!