MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
TN one of his retrospects, Mr. Noel Coward adopted an ingenious device for marking the passage of the years between
1914 and 1918. The same patriotic verse was sung five times over in such a way as to show the increasing strain of war. The first version, which was the version of 1914, was gay, adventurous, alluring and aloof ; one had the impression that the wench who sang the song might well have been singing " The Absent-Minded Beggar " of 1899 ; inviolable, invincible and unperturbed, Britannia, with a certain dismissive levity, was sending her lads overseas. The second version, which marked the transition to the autumn of 1915, was less confident ; the notes still fluttered gaily, but the first year's casualties had left their mark. The third version was increasingly tense, since already our accustomed disasters had crowded thick around us and the bombs had begun to fall. By the 1917 version the mouth of the singer, a mere rose-bud in 1914, began to show hard lines at the corners ; and the fifth time she sang the song the girl almost staggered with exhaustion, her legs seemed to drag, and as she forced her smiles and her tremolos, one felt that her poor ribs creaked and ached. The words did not vary, they remained frivolous and confident ; the girl was the same, and she twirled her arms and hands with identical gestures ; yet at the last version one felt indeed that hers was the head upon which four mighty years had come and that the eyelids were a little weary. It was a most ingenious device.
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