29 SEPTEMBER 1944, Page 4

I do not know whether Mr. Amery, in defending the

Indian Army on Tuesday against the strictures of an irresponsible Ameri- can journalist (one of the charges was that it was a mercenary force —volunteers being apparently of a lower status than "draft " men), quoted A. E. Housman's poem on " A Mercenary Army"; he was not reported as having done so, and the verses are short enough for me to supply the omission.

These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling, And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended ; They stood, and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.

There is the stuff of immortality in this.