"TOMMY ATKINS."
[TO THZ EDITOR OF TH1 "STECTLTOR."]
SIR,—After reading your article in last week's Spectator dealing with Dr. Johnson's views on the calling of the soldier, I wondered whether you would care to have brought to your notice, if you had not already seen it, the opinion of the modern "Tommy Atkins" expressed by one who has always been intimate with him and loved him. This is how Mr. Blatchford writes in a recent issue of the Weekly Dispatch :— " The British Army, of all ranks and of all arms, has in this campaign done more than its. warmest admirers expected. I am doing my best to speak with judicial moderation, but I find it very difficult to rein in my pen when it has to write of Tommy Atkins. Of the Army I will simply express the opinion that there are no better troops in the world, and never were any better troops in the world. . . . As for Tommy Atkins, he is unique. To say that we love him and are proud of him is not enough ; we have to say that besides being the finest soldier we ever knew he is the most original and peculiar kind of soldier the world has yet produced. I do not believe that any nation but the British could produce a Tommy Atkins, and I do not believe that the British have ever produced him so successfully before. Tommy Atkins marching or entraining for the front ; Tommy Atkins in the French villages ; Tommy Atkins under fire ; Tommy Atkins fighting day after day on the retreat; Tommy Atkins wounded ; Tommy Atkins anywhere and all the time is the most astounding and magnificently British personality ever seen upon a field of battle. . . . The real Tommy Atkins ; the fully developed Tommy Atkins who nurses French babies, scrubs his landlady's table, marches to battle singing music-hall songs, argues about Gunboat Smith in the midst of the shell fire, and lays down the fag of his cigarette while he goes out to fight two German Guardsmen with the bayonet—this Tommy Atkins was born after the Boer War. Cockney Tommy, Lanca- shire Tommy, Devonshire Tommy, Irish Tommy, Highland Tommy; Tommy of the line Tommy of the lancers, Tommy of the Grenadiers, Tommy of the artillery and of the hospital corps ; Tommy in Bengal, Tommy at Gib., Tommy on the trooper, Tommy at Mona—was there ever such a soldier seen or heard of P Find him in books P No. Dickens could not have invented him ; even Laurence Sterne could not have invented him. As a French officer says of him, 'He is always brave, and calm, and courteous
and clean.' . . . Some tell us England is decadent, that the British are played out. But the nation which can turn out men like Tommy Atkins by the hundred thousand has not come yet to the top of its form; is only now moving towards its highest achievement."
This is high praise, but can any one who knows our soldiers, or who has read about their conduct and bearing in the field during the Iast two months, say that the picture is in the least overdrawn ?—I am, Sir, &c., J. H. B.
[Happily there are plenty more where these came from. When Mr. Blatchford went down to Aldershot and the camps adjacent he saw a sight that we are sure gladdened his heart—thousands upon thousands of the recruits training with an eagerness and an intensity of purpose which can only be described as awe- inspiring. One can read what their history is going to be in their eyes. The strange thing is that, though only soldiers three weeks old, they seem to have got already the authentic' tradition of the British Army.—En. Spectator.]
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