Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/16

xii of which no real Cockney is capable. The origin of this convention is very much of a mystery. By some critics it is supposed to be a result of the far-flung popularity of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's stories of soldiers. In his delightful book of reminiscences Major-General Sir George Younghusband makes the following curious comments on this theory:

I, myself, had served for many years with soldiers, but had never once heard the words or expressions that Rudyard Kipling's soldiers used. Many a time did I ask my brother officers whether they had ever heard them. No, never. But, sure enough, a few years after, the soldiers thought, and talked, and expressed themselves exactly like Rudyard Kipling had taught them in his stories! He would get a word here, or a stray expression there, and weave them into general soldiers' talk in his priceless stories. Rudyard Kipling made the modern soldier. Other writers have gone on with the good work, and they have between them manufactured the cheery, devil-may-care, lovable person enshrined in our hearts as Tommy Atkins.

However that may be, it is certain that the men of the New Army deeply resent the literary fashion which makes them talk like Chevalier's Cockney types—nay, even worse in a more variegated way, for the Chevalier dialect was actually spoken by the costermongers of his time, whereas the diction of soldiers in popular war-stories is as fearfully and wonderfully made, as excruciatingly eclectic in fact, as the most recondite Doric of the Kailyard novelists. The men of the Lower Deck, who are all highly educated specialists, find this literary fashion most offensive to their self-respect, as I know from many