Mule Races and Pillow Fights

Letters

Vol. 31 No. 17 · 10 September 2009

From Editor, ‘London Review’

Bernard Porter did his best to remind us that it wasn’t Carlo D’Este, the author of Warlord: A Life of Churchill at War, 1874-1945, but Churchill himself, who wrote: ‘Given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.’ It was our mistake, and our mistake, too, that it went uncorrected (LRB, 27 August).

In Walter Benn Michaels’s piece in the same issue, the sentence ‘White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile’ should have read: ‘White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those in the bottom quintile.’ Editorial gremlins, we’d like to think.

Editor, ‘London Review’

Vol. 31 No. 18 · 24 September 2009

From Stephen Sedley

Bernard Porter is surely right to doubt Carlo D’Este’s assertion that Churchill (or any other individual, come to that) ‘was the first to introduce marching songs’ (LRB, 27 August). Marching songs must have been around for as long as troops have been required to march in step. William III’s troops marched in 1688 to ‘Lillibulero’, and it is likely that the New Model Army did so before them: the tune, of uncertain origin, had been widely popular, with an anti-papist lyric, since 1641. In America, the Union armies marched to ‘John Brown’s Body’, and both sides marched to their own versions of George Root’s ‘The Battle-Cry of Freedom’. The Confederate troops’ adoption of the traditional song ‘Green Grows the Laurel’ as a marching song is probably the origin of the Mexican sobriquet ‘gringo’.

As to the First World War, in which Churchill served from 1915 to 1916, Eric Partridge’s anthology The Long Trail starts with a section of 33 songs ‘predominantly sung on the march’, followed by another 17 ‘sung on the march, but more often in billets and estaminets’. None can conceivably have been the work of an officer. Not one of them is aggressive or triumphalist or even hortatory. Most were sung to hymn tunes or were parodies of popular songs. They range from the blank resignation of ‘We’re here because we’re here’ (to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’), through ‘We are Fred Karno’s army’ (to the tune of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’), to the bitter tabulation of privilege and rank in ‘The Old Barbed Wire’. The latter (‘If you want to find the quarter-bloke, I know where he is – miles and miles behind the line … If you want to find the CO I know where he is – down in the deep dugouts … If you want the old battalion, I know where they are – hanging on the old barbed wire’) is the story of Churchill’s war, with his private bath and boiler being towed around behind him.

Anyone who remembers Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War will remember ‘When this lousy war is over’, sung to the tune of ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’. Partridge’s version, which he lists as a marching song, starts ‘When this blasted war is over’. But in 1966 I recorded the song from a Kentish traveller, Joe Cooper, who had fought in the trenches, had survived two gas attacks (‘it rolled towards you like the early mist in the hopfields’), had found himself homeless and jobless on demobilisation, and had married a Romany woman and gone on the road. The version Joe remembered began ‘When this wicked war is over’.

Stephen Sedley
London WC1

From Tim Gallwey

Bernard Porter refers to Carlo D’Este’s account of Churchill’s ‘much self-publicised “great escape” from the Boers in Pretoria’. Since Churchill himself gave at least three different versions of this story, it has long been time for the truth to be revealed. My grandfather was a fellow POW and my father passed his version on to me in a letter many years ago. My grandfather and others had ‘made a plan to escape, and dug a tunnel under the wire. Churchill, regarded as utterly unreliable, was rigidly excluded from the plan, but managed to discover the escape was planned for a certain night. The night before, he managed to get through the tunnel and escape, destroying all chance of escape for the 20 to 30 men who had dug the tunnel, as Churchill’s absence was immediately noted at roll-call in the morning.’ It appears that two others, Haldane and Brockie, claimed that they had been going to go with him but were left in the lurch. ‘It did not enter my head that he would play the low-down game of going without us,’ Haldane said.

Tim Gallwey
Oloron-Sainte-Marie, France

From Colin Lovelace

Bernard Porter wonders whether Britain in 1940 could have found a leader with ‘a better grasp of military strategy’ who might have done the job more quickly and more efficiently than Churchill. But it was Churchill with his singular command of strategy who saw the immediate need, once Pétain had done the deal with Germany, to destroy the French fleet at Oran before it was used by the Germans as the determining factor in an invasion force. Again only Churchill, as a former First Lord of the Admiralty, had the authority to overcome the strong opposition within the Admiralty itself. But with this decision, he showed the world, and America in particular, that Britain, when necessary, could act as ruthlessly as Germany.

Colin Lovelace
Anglet, France

Vol. 31 No. 20 · 22 October 2009

From Fawaz Ghitani

Bernard Porter, in his appraisal of Churchill’s views on warfare, observes that ‘he notoriously supported the saturation bombing of German cities (though he later had qualms), and the use, in theory, of poison gas’ (LRB, 27 August). But Churchill had even fewer moral reservations about weapons of mass destruction in colonial wars, notably in Mesopotamia, which Porter doesn’t mention. When tribes in southern Iraq rose in revolt against British occupation in 1920, Churchill, then secretary of state for war, presided over the bombing of whole villages, and very nearly ordered the use of mustard gas to subdue the insurgents. In his words, ‘I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.’

Fawaz Ghitani
London NW6

Vol. 31 No. 22 · 19 November 2009

From Ernesto Priego

I am Mexican, and lived in Mexico for 29 years, but I never heard anyone use the term ‘gringo’ to refer to anyone other than US citizens. In the third volume of Historia, tradiciones y leyendas de calles de México (1999) Artemio de Valle-Arizpe writes that the word ‘gringo’ first appeared in Mexico after the incursion of General Winfield Scott in September 1847. De Valle-Arizpe describes an ‘unhappy’ and ‘abominable’ song that Scott’s troops sang incessantly, and which began with the words ‘Green Grow’. The Mexican historian tells how the locals, not knowing English, interpreted the song’s first words as ‘gringo’. I grew up seeing graffiti that read ‘Green Go Home’ next to a cartoon of Uncle Sam.

The ‘authorities’ Malcolm Deas alludes to (Letters, 22 October) may be Barbara and David Mikkelson, who themselves refer to Hugh Rawson’s Devious Derivations (1994), where Rawson cites the Diccionario Castellano de Málaga (1877), which defines ‘gringo’ as ‘any foreigner who speaks a language other than Spanish’. The Mikkelsons then make a giant leap of logic and assume that the term has to come from griego because in Spain they allegedly say está en griego (‘it’s in Greek’) when they don’t understand something. This idiom is completely unknown in Mexico – we say ‘it’s in Chinese.’

Ernesto Priego
University College London