ENPages
page_0001
Telephone Regent 6400 Telegrams: c/o Hellenist, (Piccy.)
9 Oct 25
THE ATHENÆUM, Pall Mall, S.W.1.
My dear John
I am sorry that I shall not be able to be with you on Wednesday - I have to go down to Clifton to a Council meeting with a unique item on the Agenda & Whitty has written to me for my advice.
Your Fusiliers betrayed me badly - I read it in my bus down Fleet Street - a simple
page_0002
straightforward chapter with nothing purple in it : but I wept my dear John, I wept with a painful kind of happiness. You are right a hundred times over to tell it as you do but you should give it away in a parcel tied & posted & sealed. - I could have managed very well in my own room at home. Compare your book with my calm scientific narrative, which wouldn't make a baby cry - not even if you dropped it on his toes. Yours is of course Biography - a Regiment is a person : mine isn't even History - it's only "Operations". A ship's a large & living thing, but you can't see it in action - you're either 18000 yards away or you're shut up in an armoured cell. We can't even guess what Hood thought or said as he went down. About Cradock I know, because I knew him, but that story was not left for me to tell.
Well, we're like the Wife
page_0003
of Bath - we have lived in a great age.
It tikleth me about my herte's root
Unto this day it doth my hertë boot
That I have had my world, as in my time.
And you have written about it. I can't think why they don't offer you the O.M. I suppose because it is "soiled with all L-Georgian use".
Yours ever
H.N.
[ST: Sir Henry Newbolt]
