days; but everybody will be glad if the London Master Bakers’ Society
will take the matter well in hand and see to it that we need not “live
on the husks which the swine did eat.” The country will not starve
because we prefer to be well on white flour rather than dyspeptic on
brown!
“SHODDY CHIVALRY”
A NAVAL CHADBAND
(_Published in the “Pall-Mall Gazette”_)
So now we know! No longer need we denounce the “submarine menace”; no
longer need we (as the German Press suggests) “grow pallid with fear,”
for we are in “brave and gallant hands!” “Brave and gallant” are the
noble creatures who sink hospital ships; “brave and gallant” are the
sharers of dividends in the corpse-fat factory; “brave and gallant” are
the raiders who sought to intercept the Prime Minister on his way back
from France across Channel in order to make short work of him and his
escort--“brave and gallant” are they all! Our own Vice-Admiral at Dover
implied as much when, with all the unctuousness of Dickens’s immortal
Mr. Chadband, he laid a wreath of flowers on the coffin of one of the
Hun raiders with the inscription: “To a brave and gallant enemy!” He
spared no wreath and offered no tribute to any of the dead among our
own bluejackets, whose “brave and gallant” conduct had succeeded in
beating off and sinking the enemy’s ships; they were “only” British
sailors. But for the dead Huns, this British Vice-Admiral publicly
displayed the tenderness of a twin brother. One wonders what Nelson
would have said to such an action? How does it accord with the
Defence of the Realm? One can imagine the noble dust of the victor of
Trafalgar stirring for very shame at such a lack of dignity at the
very time when British ships are being wickedly sunk and British lives
wickedly lost by the nefarious “brave and gallant” brutality of an
enemy with whom honour is a mere straw. It may perhaps be easier now to
understand the rumours that these “brave and gallant” Huns are allowed
to work with our men in British docks, where they watch our ships
loaded with millions of munitions, and count up our troops leaving for
the front, and then, without doubt, communicate with their kinsmen of
the submarines, letting them know the hour and moment of departure! No
wonder that our ships are sunk! Such methods prepare the way for their
sinking. No action is taken by the authorities to put a stop to the
inroad of German labour in the docks alongside of the British--a state
of things which, on the face of it, invites and encourages spying and
treachery. Such scandals are “an offence that’s rank, And smells to
Heaven”; and the powers in office who allow them to go on without check
are nearly as guilty of the loss of torpedoed ships and lives as the
Huns themselves. And when a British Vice-Admiral sets the hall-mark of
“brave and gallant” on even a dead specimen of the most treacherous,
inhuman, and barbaric foe his country has ever had to contend with, we
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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