Great Britain's Great Little Men

New Zealand Herald, Volume 78, Issue 24141, 6 December 1941, Page 15

Great Britain's Great Little Men

By W. F. LEYSMITH

ALL of Britain's "little men" have a single thought on the war—it has got to be won, somehow. About Adolf Hitler there is one idea also—he has got to be "deposed." But about the Germans themselves, investigation shows, there is a vast confusion of thought, Ask one of those low-salaried, large-familied little fellows, with his striped pants, derby hat and inevitable umbrella, as he sits quietly over his glass of bitter, what he thinks of the Germans now and, if he doesn't explode, the odds are he will look at you as if he hadn't given the Germans a thought for weeks. If he explodes he is probably one of the many who think the Germans "let us down" by "not revolting against the Nazis when Britain declared war on Hitlerism," or who blame tlie whole

German race for things like Rotterdam and the machine-gunning of lighthouse men. If he looks at you blankly for a moment or two, it is most probably because he lias been so preoccupied with the problem of how to win the war and depose Hitler that ho has almost forgotten what he really did think about the Germans the last time ho thought about them. He will sometimes take half a glass of beer before he has ruminated sufficiently to say: "Oh, the Germans are all crazy": or "There are good and bad, just like here"; or "It's those young Germans that are at the bottom of it"; or "They always were a blooming nuisance in Europe and always will be." Some suggest a fate for all Germans and Hitler too dreadful to mention. The wives of others will put flowers on the grave of a German airman washed up on the beach after a bombing raid. There is no agreement about Germans as there is about winning the war or

about Hitler —who has lost all his admirers among Britain's little men, including the greengrocer who used to say to his lazy deliverv boy: "You want .-< Hitler here for six months to liven you up, mv lad!" They are very sore at Hitler. But, mostly, they think the Germans "just crazy." The little barber holds that putting Lord Haw Haw, the English-born follower of Sir Oswald Moseley, on the German radio day after day is "proof positive of German madness." "Would any sane people," he asked, "put an English traitor on the air throughout a war to convert us to Hitlerism? No, a cultured German might have stood a chance —but not Lord Haw Haw. I think Haw Haw brands the whole crowd. If they were gentlemen they would employ a gentleman to talk to us. That fellow Haw Haw is just an insult —ho gpts my blood up!" A wholesale fishmonger believed the war started "like a back-yard squabble between rival ideologies." "Anyway,' he added, "it's given us another chance

to finish with war for all time now. That's why we've got to win it. Peace now would only mean war in another ten years." Uppermost in the mind of a taciturn maritime pilot from the Far retired twice removed through bombing, was that he "would rather meet a German in a fog than the ship of anv other nation —because you know the German will do the right thing." "How shall we beat them? Oh, wear them out —we can stick it longer than they can — we've jolly well got to!" To a cheery taxi-driver, veteran of the last war, the German is "Still the same old Merry'—a great fighter; and it's the same old story—we've got the bows and arrows and he's got the machine-guns." "You know," he added as he climbed into his seat, "it's the young Germans who have been causing all the. trouble. The over-thirties didn't want this war any more than we did."

—Condensed from Tho New York Times Magazine.