SIR,—Mr. C. E. Montague wrote in his Disenchantment of the
" cheerfulness in face of vicarious torment and danger" shown by the averagewar correspondent during the last war. Other listeners may have been reminded of his words, as I was, when they listened to the B.B.C. recording from a bomber station made ontthe night of the big Dortmund raid. "Through his despatches," Mr. Montague wrote, in a passage which might almost have been inspired by this particular broadcast, " there ran a brisk implication that officers and men enjoyed nothing so much as 'going over the top,' that a battle was just a rough, jovial picnic, that a fight never went on long enough for the men." Through this particular broadcast there ran just that " jauntiness of tone " which, in Mr. Montague's day, " roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer."
One sentence in the Air Ministry's communiqué seemed oddly out of place in this happy picture of bonhommic, with its pats on the back for the ground crews and for the navigator with the long moustaches.
"Thirty-eight of our bombers are missing."—Yours, &c.
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