Old Soldiers Never Die

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 794, 8 October 1954, Page 15

Old Soldiers Never Die

HERE are four dimensions in the normal world, but outside it there is, Heaven be praised, the world of faery. Folk tales and fables spring from the very roots of our existence and have an unalterable truth about them. In Russia, for instance, they have told for centuries past the legend of The Nosebag. It seems that there was once a poor discharged soldier wandering the roads

with nothing but three biscuits as a reward for twenty-five years’ service. He meets three beggars to whom he gives his biscuits. In return he is given a pack of cards which will win for him each time he plays and a nosebag into which he can command to jump "any bird, beast or fowl." The soldier begins to make his way by spending a night in a devil-haunted palace of the Tsar, and chastising the demonic inhabitants very thoroughly. Fortune and the soldier’s own native cunning combine to get him the position of physician to the Tsar and enable him to abolish Death. Eventually, however, he and the ever-ageing populace grow weary of life and, in a mood of Slavic despondency, the soldier decides to seek punishment. in Hell for his interference with the natural order of things. But the devils will not take him. He proposes to try Heaven and carries off with him a _ good-riddance

present from the devils in the form of two hundred and fifty lost souls, The spirits are welcomed, but again there is no place in Heaven for a live man. He must return to Mother Russia to be her man-at-arms for ever. Louis MacNeice, the English poet, has adapted the folk tale for radio. Classical scholar, lyric poet, radio dramatist and lecturer, MacNeice has won an outstanding place among modern writers by his masterly and imaginative command of the microphone. An _ acknowledged leader of the rebel intellectual poets of the thirties, since 1940 he has written some fine work for the BBC, notably The Dark Tower, with music by Benjamin Britten, and an adaptation in verse of Goethe’s Faust. The NZBS production of Louis MacNeice’s The Nosebag has been directed by William Austin, with Roy Leywood as the Soldier. Station 1YC will broadcast The Nosebag on Saturday, October 16, at 9.30 p.m., and it will be heard later from other National stations,