GOERING’S SPEECH
LANGUAGE OF PIRATES Who would have dreamed that we should find Goering, one of our most ferocious Nazi enemies, using a phrase dear to British children? The question is asked by a writer in a London journal, who continues: Speaking recently of the immense international armies arrayed against his land Goering stated: “The three greatest Powers 'in the world are marshalled against us. Such a concentration of forces is almost a compliment to Germany!” Where has that last phrase, slightly varied, been familiarly heard by fens of thousands of British children? Where but in Peter Pan. It crops up, appropriately enough, with the assembly of a group of pirates. Two of them. Captain Hook, the leader, and Smee, the bespectacled buccaneer who uses a sewing-machine, confer in the absence of the others, and Hook confesses that he goes in fear of a certain crocodile, which lias carried off his right arm. “The brute liked my arm so much, Since,” he says, “that he has followed me ever since from sea to sea, and from land to land.” Then it is that Smee anticipates Goering. “In a way it is a sort of compliment,” he murmurs.
In the end the crocodile gets his man; in the end the Allies will get theirs, too.
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Bibliographic details
Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 21601, 2 January 1945, Page 8
Word Count
214GOERING’S SPEECH Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 21601, 2 January 1945, Page 8
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