The Martial Adventures of Henry and MeWhite, William Allen
History
The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
White, William Allen
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
blood or geography or politics men grow who hold the same creed.
So Henry, feeling that restraints no longer were necessary when
we were as near home as England, began fussing with an Englishman
about something a speaker had said in parliament the day before.
We may love the French, like the ladies, God bless 'em! But we
quarrel only with the English.
When we came to London we saw, even as we whirled through the
grey old streets, surface differences between London and the other
capitals of the Allies, so striking that they were marked contrasts.
These differences marked the different reactions of personal loss
upon the different nations. France expresses her loss in mourning;
she relieves her emotions in visible grief. Italy does this also;
but her losses have been smaller than the French losses and Italy's
sorrow is less in evidence than is the woe of France. But England's
master passion in this war is pride. "In proud and loving memory"
is a phrase that one sees a hundred times every day in the obituary
notices of those who have died for England. Ambassador Page tells
this: He was asking a British matron about her family, severally,
and when he inquired about the son, she replied, "Haven't you
heard of the new honour that has come to us through him?" And to
her friend's negative she returned: "He has been called upon to die
for England!" Now that seems rather French in its dramatics than
British. Yet it reflects exactly the British attitude. The women wear
no mourning. They do not go about in bright colours by any means.
Bright colours in the war distinguish the men. But the women do wear
dark blues, lavenders and purples, dark wine colours and neutral
tints of various hues. The shop windows of London are bright. There
is a faint re-echo of the time when Great Britain said, "Business
as usual." The busy life, the shopping crowds, the street throngs,
and the heavy streams of trade that flow through the highways of
London, prove that London still is a great city--the greatest city
in the world: and even the war, black and dread and horrible as it
is, cannot overcome London, entirely. Something of the fact that
she is the world's metropolis, more permanent than the war, somewhat
apart from the war, and indeed above it, still lingers in the London
consciousness, however remotely.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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