MARGINAL COMMENT
NICOLSON By HAROLD
IN Odette Keun's recent book, And Hell Followed, there is a passage which is strange and welcome to me as coming from one who in the past has been so angry, and even rude, about the imprecisions of the English character. "I do not," she writes, "envy Britain—or any other country—anything ; no race in the world seems to me worthy of provoking pride ; no people lives up to my notion of civilised man. But I wish—yes, I wish—that I could call the R.A.F. mine." She is writing, of course, about the Battle of Britain, about those anxious days when our fighters traced gigantic question- marks against the sky, and when we watching below them became day by day more fired with the wild surmise that victory had been won. Since then the R.A.F. have gained other laurels and struck mightier blows. Yet none of their many episodes and adventures has filled me with such elation as Flight-Lieutenant Gatward's recent visit to Paris. The account which he himself gave of this expedition was a masterpiece of modest glee. I listened entranced. And next day I read the whole story again in the newspaper France, which printed every word he said. I found that to read his talk in French give it an added significance, partly because one was conscious how deeply it would move the homesick exiles and partly because the French words brought out the extreme "Englishness" of Lieutenant Gat- ward's story. He told us how he and Sergeant Ferns had hedge- hopped across France, flying so low that their photographs showed the surprised eyes of horses grazing in the fields below. "Nous n'avons pas," continues the French text, "trop derange ces chevaux, ni li betail." This phrase had not struck me particularly when I heard it upon the wireless ; but when repeated in the mirror of the French language, how English it seems, how gentle!
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