THE SPEECHES OF GERMANY.
ETD THE EDITOR or TEE " SPECTATOR."3 Stn, Some of your readers may not have come across an amusing and, from the linguistic and pathlesl point of view, significant anecdote cited by If. A. Meillet in his delightful and instructive little book, Les Leagues dans l'Europe nourelle. The anecdote is translated from the Frankfurter Zeitung of August. 8th, 1917 (morning. edition), and, coming from a German source, may be accepted as being free from anti-German bias. It is this :—
" Two German soldiers, one Lunn the North, the other a Bavarian, were working together in the occupied part of France. The Northerner asked the Bavarian to lend him his axe. But the speech of the two men differed so widely that they could not understand one another. However, the Bavarian explained: by signs that he could not spare his tool. The Northern German then said, `Toil/ensile retail?. I ' using the language which the German troops employ in occupied parts of France. The Bavarian replied, ` true, wui, kompri.'"
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