1938-10-14 — Page 22

10

THE

HONGKONG TELEGRAPH, FRIDAY, OCTOBER

14, 1938.

Where Were They

TWENTY YEARS AGO?

THE War was nearly over,

but nobody seemed to think so. Mr. Bonar Law was saying that the Allies would certainly have lost if it ever became possible for a man or group of men to plunge the world into such a conflict again.

Mr. Neville Chamberlain had Just stopped beng Minister of National Service with his own

ht department St. Ermin's Hotel. Mr. Charles Chaplin had just started his own company in Hollywood because "Shoulder Arms" had been so successful.

Sir Thomas Horder had got his knighthood (it was in the New Year's Honours List) for his work at the Royal Cancer Hospital in Fulham and man- who agera were wondering would replace Leslie Henson, drafted to the Flying Corps to do clerical work.

M

IVOR NOVELLO had

made his name as an actor in "The Yellow Jacket" and as a composer by writing a pantomime hit, "Keep the Home Fires Burning." He had n musical comedy running called "Arlette," but he could not do very much about that because he was in the War Office (after two acroplane crashes) working under the keen eye of Winston Churchill's Military Secretary, a young Lifeguardsman called Sir Archibald Sinclair.

MUSSOLINI

ANTHONY EDEN

PROF. EINSTEIN.

Corporal Hitler, of the 16th Bavarian (Reserve) Infantry Battalion, raved about traitors Lieutenant

while

Beverley Nichols officer in the Spanish Army list, in a Berlin suburban hospital was driving about the Middle had just got himself engaged in

recovering from

the Weat as military representative Oviedo, where he commanded effects of mustard gas (but if it

on the British Universities Mis- the 3rd Infantry and the men used to complain that he treated

was mustard gas, why was he sion to Americu. discharged after three weeks?). The men in his ward. would not

have met the dark,

By George Edinger

Lieutenant Raymond Massey of the Canadian Infantry asked himself if there really was

HOW LITTLE YOU KNOW

DECENTLY, 1 found myself wilting

in the crape-like gloom of n remote Scottish village, the victim of one of the periodle eruptions of the family conscience over its solitary malden aunt, Inspection of the sittingroom bookcase having revealed nothing more brightly entertaining than "Ministering Children," "Chris ly's Oki Organ,"

an." "Jessica's First Prayer," and other such cherished prizes of well-spent youth, I

furtively out and made craic tracks for the High Street. There, to the tune of ninepence for half-a-dozen weeklies, I encouraged the flaunting

confectioner

T

much point in backing up Ad. coveted they of the local-

miral Koltchak.

IN the tumbling ruins of to-day some men and women worked hopefully for to- morroiv, Through the worst straits of War the Imperial not German Government did withdraw the grant that en- abled Albert Einstein to, pursue his theories of Relativity.

Sir J. Henry Wood, that year. decided that. British music held sufficient future for him to turn down an offer to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ronald Colman, just invalided out of the. Service, was back touring in a play called "The Bubble," and Gracie Fields, at Long Eaton, sang "Sheikh of Alabam" in a revue called "Mr. Tower of London," which was not, they said, a patch on the Byng Boys.

it appeared, from the sale of Sunday papers more than be feared the Judgment his scandalised neighbours sternly predicted,

I returned home with my booty,

and settled down with it in happy relief, to while away the next fe hours. However, the Judgment must have decided to descend that day, and, for Erlet share in the un-

my Br hallowed transactions, to include mo In its sphere of operations, for I had only read us far as page two of my first paper when the trouble began. And, lke all other tragedies, it be gan simply enough with n dear old lady.

The Old Lady's Fasciem

It seemed, according to a parn. graph on page two, that this Innocent originator of my subsequent humilia. tion had much mystified and dis- tressed her family by stoutly declar

firm believer in ing herself to be a Fascism; which mystification and distress were happlly lightened by the discovery that she imagined Fascism to be something for making trains run on time.

three

smiled a little smile of tenderly indulgent superiority, and was about when the to go on to page movement of my head was arrested as if with the jerk of instantaneous brakes, and my smile became sud- denty fixed and glossy. What was that I had heard? A plaintive voice "Well, then, what exactly is

And to tell to-morrow what it was all like, John Masefield was recording his impressions of Gallipoli and Augustus John, with grey hair tumbling in-king,

congruously over the collar of his major's uniform, went round the Western front to paint its horrors and its humours,

☆

the

I became dls-

I dwelt uncomfortably with my

the

Icw for.

next imagination minutes, hearing myself trying to answer the question with due refer- ence to that ominous "exactly."

know!

1 cer- After all, I ought to

heard about read or MR. WILLIAM MOR- tainly

ten times wretched thing at least ten RIS, busy turning

every day. But why was it called them like Moorish levics he had out munitions in his Cowley Fascism and what exactly did it con- shot at an grown accustomed to ordering workshop, had not forgotten the note? I had a heroic be taught how to win the war HE may or may not around Tetuan.

possibilities of a cheap car when exact and lucid explanation, but realised that my muddled by "someone who had wangled

the war should be over, Already achievement of Dictators and Totall- Through a poor street in a new city, livelier than thetarian States. was like defining a cushy job in the battalion silent Scot called John Reith orderly room."

placing American contracts for Stockholm a flaxen headed 12-empty Oxford over the river, spade in terms of agricultural imple- British munitions (the payment year-old schoolgirl called Greta where Aldous Huxley had been ments. Moreover, is still un uwkward question), Garbo was wondering how she almost the only undergraduate tactly nervous when I got to the

Totalitarian State! RECRUIT in the but in one of the recepions given was going to enjoy the job in the past four years, had shot A

Artists Rifles, Rifle at Washington he must have waiting for her in a soap factory up round the suburb, hitherto The Two "Thirds" man Coward, had just gone into seen the energetic chief of that and in the counting house of a tenanted only by scouts, Angli-

However, the old Jody had given hospital at Gidea Park, Rom- department in the United States Welsh mining company an office can fathers and recruits from

me an idea for the profitable employ- leisure. of Richards the depot of the Oxford and ment

my enforced ford, where the battalion was Navy Office which was in charge boy named Gordon

hunted out a sheet of Quickly i training, because he broke his of the Fleet in European waters, was seriously considering whe- Bucks Light Infantry.

a pencil, und proceeded Women conducted buses and paper head slipping on a soapy duck most promising of all President ther he might be better at

set myself a newspaper Wilson's young men, Franklin something else.

trams along the Thames Em- general knowledge test. In other Benito Mussolini had come Roosevelt.

Captain (acting Major actual bankment, where the lamp words, I proposed to dig out of my out of hospital at Milan and Brigadier General Mustafa minor) Anthony Eden com- globes were painted black on was writing angry newspaper Kemal had returned sulkily to manded at 20 a battalion of the river side to stop enemy articles, "his eyes popping out his command in Palestine after the King's Royal Rifle Corps in pilots seeing their reflection in of his head" with emotion, over a violent quarrel with the Ger- the worst part of the line, did the Thames, and no clocks Caporetto.

man high command (he could not look like coming out of it. struck the hour day or night for

Clement Attlee Major Hore-Belisha was flit- not stand the Germans) about Major

was fear of waking weary munition ting round the Near East in the the strategy of the campaign taking a tank over the top, and makers. green-tabbed uniform of the against Allenby. Major Fran- in a mournful waste at the

Franco Intelligence Service, and 2nd cisco

youngest field wrong end of Russia Second- ago.

board.

NEWS FROM BERLIN

Hitler's Crucial

All that was twenty years

By IAN G. COLVIN

Harvest

"There are some farms where

THE harvest le coming home in I took train recently to a fertile land, bloomed wheat, barley, rye, sugar intense black as dusk followed.

Germany, A bad harvest could the Uckermark, fifty miles north of beet. cripple the Four Year Plan. This Berlin, to visit friends. The terminus

record crop. Wheat, rye, oats, bar settlement plans of Frederick the by side.

In spite of their

told

until

me.

year, thanked be Wolan, there is a was a tiny, village, built in the Poles and Germans worked side they reap by lanthorn light

theory midnight," the Junker ley, their ears are full to bursting. Great. Hens pecked in the dusty that Germany is suffocating for lack "You see their lanthorns winking When harvest La in, say the street, bees hummed in the village of room, the Government must per- in the durkness."! pessimists, then we shall see what lime grove, which loaded the air mit Poles, who are paid in foreign is afoot!

with perfume. Not a radio to be currency, to come and help the Ger. A mad world, and a mad land! Even n we drive down the coun- heard!

man harvest home.

may I say. So much nonsense. Ed- try roads, between poppyspeckled

The Inds who would like to be ward Lear's Dong with the Luminous cornfolds, the question of. Marcellus Here I was met by my friend with plling the bristly barley on the wain Nose would receive a medal from nc. (Hamlet, Act I., a horse trap-delightful surprise. I are all under arms, snooping around the State, and he no accurs to

had expected an armoured car, Scene L.):

the Czech frontier. The soldiers patented for nocturnal "shock work." nose. would be tell me, he that knows, This horse trop, of antique pattern, used to help the reapers ins post Why this zame strict and most brightly vamished, was drawn by years for about is. 6d. a day. This We would have regiments of Dongs

observant watch

two horses. It once belonged to year they have only been allowed with a brand-new uniform. So nightly toils the subject of the Marstal Goering, who lives nearby to in exceptional cases. The Labour

land?

in the Schorfheide, my friend told service youths are mostly occupied

And why 'such dally cast of brazen

cannon,

honour.

carta. The

It would be nice to see the Leader come into the fields and bind a sheaf,

and a

gally to

collection of newspapers terms which

I

rend in them day in and day out, transplant them to my nice, clean white paper, and see if I could write down exact and comprehensive ex- planailons.

Alnal I have not yet finished my sad clambering out of the Slough of Horrified Humiliation!

I made a ghastly, start with "The Certainly I Third International." knew two facts about it which were authentic and indisputable, but as one was that it had some connection with Russia, and the other that it I was had no connecti

connection with Rugby, not really very proud of them.

Tactfully postponed the Third International for further considera- tion, and immediately, in

in the neigh- bouring column, encountered "The Third Reich" with an arch leer fta exasperating features. Reich, remembered, was the German word for an empire, but why the third Reich? What had happened to the other two?

on

I

Now distinctly uneasy, I decided to postpone the Third Reich along with Its international contemporary, childishly revenging myself with the contemplation of their horror at Onding themselves abandoned in the same boat.

Gilt-Edged

'I think it must have been the dis- approving spirits of my Presbyterian ancestors, desirous of helping the Judgment to bring their wandering descendant back to the fold, which led ine to pick up next & Conserva live organ of the most dignified pro- priety, and to turn therein to the columns devoted to economies and finance.

There could really be no explanations of why the first para- graph to hold my casually roving

low

"110"

other

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be-

me. I was suitably impressed by the in the Western Front fortifications. Ai ten o'clock the rape seed war

all threshed, and

д trim sinck And foreign mart for impleinents of

war?

Later, a groom told me how 1

towered above, us. The need in "Do the Poles and the Germans sacks was piled into Why such impress of shipwrights, came so high. The Great Man, so

whose sore task

eye should be entitled "Qilt-edged Presbyterian ancestors insisted In- when its miseries are shared would the legen rail. was driving over get on weli?" I asked my hus, thoughtful estate-factor, then pra- Securities Reluctantly and with exorably that I must play fair, so apply to, poverty of the intellect, I

genial Prussion gentleman. farmer..

have since tried my little test, on Does not divide the Sunday from rough lanes to the chase when he ate told me that the Foica sometimes duced "forty bottles of Ring-Bo- foreboding I wrote them down be down it had to go

the week?

went through the scal. The carriage

Ree" and the labourers drank their

"Saving the fenne"! How often various unsuspicious friends, and it Third Reich. Had this. What might be toward, that this fell from strace, and my friend ac- quarrelled among themselves, over lager beer deeply, in the dark, by won an Intelligence test I would had I not read the phrasel Was it was consolingly remarkabla

how their Junch sandwiches or sweaty haste

quired it for a song,

doubtless have scored on my derfalve possible that with all my reading few pushed with any degree of Doth make the night joint labourer

women, and the German harvesters Lanthorn light,

refusal to believe that "gilt-edged" had sill only an airily vague general honour. It was still more remark bad their little disputes among them- with the day?

was here a literal description. But Iden Instead of a clear Intelligent able how few of them were Who is't, that can inform moti

comingly grateful for having their In the stubble fields the thresher selves.

ales! it was a knowledge test, and conception of what that meant?

Trying It On Others wits did not help.

deficiencies brought to their noticel was making a deafening din. It But Poles and Germans were care- Ps Mussolini does, I thought; but be

All the same, it was an excellent. Who. Indeed? The question of continued until evening, when the ful to avoid "Internecing" brawls; is too obsessed with the fate of his Deciding defiantly that, after all,

threo million Germans across the Marcellus has been put to the Ger- roebuck came stealing out of the for they knew that such quarrels

This time the Judgment got me plan, and one whose beneficent effect Anance, was a highly specialized

the border.

mind man Government by envoys extra fr woods into the water meadows, might become bloody and draw in

and soul I can branch of knowledge, which could down, and with the reckless abandon upon The ordinary and simple journalists. That Three Folish women, aquate hol, all hands. A lesson for ministers of slowly, in spite of night labour.

sheaves come lagging in not reasonably be expected to have of those who, having plumbed the thoroughly recommend. It is really

extraordinary

and distinctly char bracle of German intentions, the

had any place in my humble life, I depths, have ceased to care, 1 But, come

mitted that it was more than poe-tening) once you begin, what may, it is a good turned firmly over to the political sible. How much more I was not how many familiar numas and terms Foreign Ministry, smiles and smiles, dered Slavs, their heads bound In Statel

discover bright kerchiefs, stood up aloft and gives the reassuring answer..

round the steel jaws of the thresher The thresher droned on as dark, sight for tired eyes, this allen corn

pages, which I conscientiously scan-

yet callous enough completely to there are of whose anticance you and piled bundles of rape scad into ness foll. The tireless. Poles handled in golden billows, and the sturdy ned, trying all the while not to see

have no absolutely necurate know- them. The rape seed harvest is the sheaves, the chaff, the straw; horses dragging it towards

the pushing headlines acclaiming M. with Weltpolitik, Daladier's noble efforts to "save the

Wondering hopefully if the axiom ledge. Try it and seeling twice as good as last year, the Ger- and the straw stack grow immense, granary, Down

Irone." But it was no

about poverty never seerning so bad Around rosy and golden in the sunset, and and Hall Harvest!

use. My

May Young man foreman

So let us quit disgusting politics for a day, and see the harvest home.

told me.

the

Assessi

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