"No Fuss"

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 27, 26 October 1940, Page 15

"No Fuss"

“The old lady who. during an aitraid stayed at home and ate her dinner because she thought her canary was nervous, and the housemaid who called her mistress with 'bombs’ as calmly as she would have with -your tea’ —to neither of these could it have occurred that their sangfroid would ever get into print, to become famous over two hemispheres. These arc only two particularly telling examples of a quality which those who know the English best know to be genuine and widespread. To claim It for the English is not to commit the insolent stupidity of claiming that the English are any braver than other nations. It is to claim no more than a gift of a peculiar steadiness of nerve, of Instinctive self-control, which prevents the making of a fuss. “It may well lie difficult for those who do not know this quality at first hand to see what it Involves and what it does not. That Germans should understand it seems al) but impossible. Could they see it wil.li their ow.ti eyes, they could hardly believe that: this steadiness —considering, moreover, our capacity for joking about it—did not involve a shocking callousness to the sufferings of others. “Our calmness in crisis—as they will learn too late to benefit by the discovery —does not mean that we look with indifference on bumble homes blown to bits, on women and children maimed and killed, ou lightship keepers and other non-combatants machine-gunned, on drowning men and their rescuers made victims of brutal cowardice. These things are felt and remembered, and if the curses they cause are not loud they are very deep. Nor does this steadiness mean that we take assault lying down.”—“The Times." London.