13 AUGUST 1948, Page 5

Among the youth of the Socialist Britain in which it

is at present our lot to live there seems to be a tendency for every man to expect England to do her duty by him rather than the other way round ; at any rate none of the three battalions in our brigade get any young recruits to speak of. The officers piled into their dilapidated cars. "We come here," said the battalion philosopher, "in our own cars and our own spare time, to learn how to kill the King's enemies by the most advanced methods. If we were civil servants who had come here to make sure that one of the King's subjects was not slaughtering a pig without authority we should get a travelling allow- ance and all the petrol we wanted." We bumped off past the depleted group under the gallows, agreeing that it was an odd world.