DUFF & NONSENSE!

And still the liberals ignore the slaughter of the innocent!

Another week, and another two young thugs are found guilty of murder.  They stabbed and slashed a young lawyer as he came home from work in order to steal his mobile 'phone.  They snuffed out a decent man, the son of loving parents and the fiance of a very bright young woman.  Last week it was some-one else, and next week it will be some-one else again.  The same old, same old!  But, each event is, of course, a shattering apocalypse of tragedy for the families and friends concerned.  So the 'body count', a term beloved of the liberatti when it is foreigners being killed but which is studiously avoided when the bodies concerned litter our own fair streets, continues to mount and it is now beginning to grow exponentially.  What next ...?

Well, as far as I can judge, the liberals simply shrug and if pushed on the subject will come out with some variation of the smug, complacent and utterly false proposition that it is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man is hanged.  The fact that the ten guilty men will have killed at least, and in this day and age where they kill entire families in the process of reaching their intended victim, probably more than ten innocent men, women and children seems not to be part of the equation.  One supposes that in the liberal lexicon the phrase is 'collateral damage', another subject that incenses them when it occurs amongst foreigners following action by our armed forces but which is dismissed nonchalantly when it occurs at home.  The only hope I can see is that the thugs these days are equal opportunity murderers and instead of confining their ruthless cruelties to the working-class ghettos from whence they come, they are now moving into the upper-middle-class grazing lands where the prey is softer, fatter and easier!  If they follow Shakespeare's advice and try to "kill all the lawyers" I think we can safely assume that a change in sentencing policy will follow swiftly and the gallows will swing back into operation.

Perhaps Tom ap Rhys Pryce did not die totally in vain.  R.I.P.

Mumblings from a Mall

I was in what my e-pal, Hank, would no doubt call 'a Mall' the other day.  Rather an elegant title, with a slightly 18th c. tone to it, for what is, when all is said and done, a rather prosaic collection of shops which we Brits call rather more accurately, a shopping centre.  Whatever!  As I shuffled along behind the little 'Memsahib', trying desperately to look interested in this dress or those shoes, what's left of my mind fell to wondering who the genius was who first invented the Mall as we know it today.  I use the American name because it must surely have been an American who first had the idea of gathering together every conceivable kind of shop in one space, putting a roof over it and surrounding it with an enormous car-park.  No more need to park the car half a mile away and dash in and out of shops to dodge the rain showers whilst indulging in some tricky footwork to avoid having your legs soaked by a double-decker going through a puddle created by the toss-pots who spend my Council Tax on their cars and pensions instead of mending our roads.

But I digress.  I have  sung the praises of the supermarkets many a time and oft'.  Their ability to provide the produce of the world, every day of the year, fresh, clean and scrumptious with the service of lively, friendly and attentive staff who will exchange any sub-standard goods on the spot without question, is a living monument to capitalism.  The Mall, or shopping centre, is a supermarket writ large and the genius who first had the idea should be guaranteed a place in the pantheon of capitalist Gods.  One thing is absolutely certain beyond any doubt, no socialist, state-run economy would ever have thought of, let alone implemented, such an idea.

Of course, nothing is perfect in this world, and it must be admitted that close proximity to one's fellow subjects, particularly in large numbers, is not always an attractive prospect.  Great, fat women with their distended bellies hanging over their tatty mini-skirts dragging along a posse of grubby, crew-cut, runny-nosed brats whose lack of tissues or handkerchiefs ("Wot's'at, then?") can be derived from their silver sleeves; gangs of mean-eyed, swaggering, young rats who might at first glance seem threatening until you notice their intrinsic weediness; small herds of very young girls flaunting their pathetic sexuality which they have yet to understand - and never will - no, it's not a pretty sight.  But when, finally, the little 'Memsahib' realises that I have no contribution to make to her fashion choices, I am released to find peace and solace in one of the new, splendid book-shops that not only sell books but provide armchairs and cups of coffee - bliss!

Hurrah for greedy, profit-seeking capitalists!

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

No, no, fear not; it's not another guided tour of Elsinore!  No, this time it's the thoughtful Hilary Wade, a regular commenter here, who in a comment to the previous post suggested that philosophy be included in my compulsory syllabus for school children on the grounds that it was necessary to find a way of "teaching pupils how to think".  That made me think!  And I thought I would elevate the topic to a new post.

Without nit-picking (by the way, does anyone know what's happened to 'NIB'?), I think Hilary would agree that what she really means is teaching children to reason rather than think. After all, we all think in the sense of possessing mental faculties, it is refining those thoughts into some sort of reasoned order that is the tricky bit.  However, it must be admitted that applying reasoning to an argument is something most of us do to others in an effort to discredit their arguments rather than taking some of our own medicine.  That is why 'Blogdom' is such an important arena because the medicine is forced through our gritted teeth come what may by all and sundry.

But I digress.  The questions are, first, can reasoning be taught to children?  Well, I suppose the syllogistic method is easy enough to grasp but I'm not sure how useful it is outside of philosophical circles. M' learned friend (I use that title in the general not the specific sense because I would not wish to insult anyone by suggesting that they were a lawyer!), 'Deogolwulf', reaches for it rather like a surgeon taking up a scalpel in order to dissect an opinion but I'm not sure how useful it would be in a discussion on, say, the comparative merits of 'Man U' and Chelsea F.C.  (However, it must be admitted that the time taken to conduct this logical analysis might well avoid the likely throwing of beer followed by the throwing of punches!)  I have mentioned 'logical analysis' and here we enter a very abstruse subject by which I mean, of course, that despite one or two feeble efforts when I was younger I never understood much past page 3 and now that I'm older I simply don't care!  It might be that it could be touched upon during the teaching of algebra (another subject that passed me by!) but I would hesitate to insist on it, not least because its practitioners can only ever speak to themselves because no-one else can understand a bloody word, er, or symbol!

The second question is, should reasoning in a philosophical sense be taught at all?  And here I entertain my greatest doubts.  "There are no neutral men", said that shrewd mass-murderer, Nikita Khrushchev, and how right he was!  I am not at all persuaded that your average teacher is capable of tip-toeing delicately through the minefield of philosophical warfare.  Even if they were, I can see all sorts trouble looming from fathers who are either a local shop-steward, or a foot-soldier in the ranks of the BNP.  (From personal experience, I remember in the late '70s/early '80s when 'Son of Duff' was attending school and studied Economics.  The teachers would have been horrified to stand accused of prejudice but their unthinking allegiance to Keynesianism was precisely that!  Fortunately, 'SoD' had been got at by a healthy dose of Milton Friedman, whose passing we all mourn - don't we?)

So all in all, I must regretfully distance myself from Hilary's proposal.  However, in the generous way you can expect from your Dear Leader when I achieve office, I shall insist that all schools form a debating society as part of their extra-curricular activities.  It might not do them a lot of good but it may stop some of them from smoking behind the bicycle sheds - or even worse!

Dear Leader Duff #2: Edukashun, Edukashun, Edukashun!

Only the snivelling running-dogs who administer education have anything good to say about the present condition of education.  The teachers at the chalk-face give every appearance of misery, anger and defeated cynicism.  Only two weeks ago I was speaking to a very bright young woman (but don't, for God's sake, tell the little 'Memsahib') who had just given up teaching, a job she had loved and into which she had poured all her considerable enthusiasm and skill, but after a while she found she was only able to spend a third of her time in front of the children, the rest was spent filling in forms and returns to the pox-doctor's clerks who administer the system (see post below!)  Even the wholly admirable Shuggy is hard to read sometimes because again, one senses a dedicated teacher, a man desperate to impart knowledge and to widen the mental horizons of children he obviously cares about, and yet he is stymied again and again - by the system.

In view of all that, your Dear Leader will, on sweeping into office with the benefit of Hank's 'hanging chad' voting machines (God Bless America!) make education a priority by immediately selling all the schools to co-operatives of the staff from the Head to the dinner ladies who will own shares in proportion to their salaries.  Each secondary school co-operative will have a board consisting of 2 teachers, 3 parent governors, the Head (as Chief Executive) and an independent local accountant.  Primary schools and those in remote regions will be allowed a smaller executive board.  All schools will be given a block grant from the Treasury to provide basic running costs for a year or so.  All local education authorities will be closed and the pen-pushers, or key-board bashers, pushed out into the real world!  Parents will be given education vouchers to be spent at the school of their choice and the schools can redeem these vouchers for cash via the Treasury.  For the first 10 years, no school will be permitted to sell its land but it will be permitted to buy other schools if its board so decides - mergers, of course, may well produce greater savings to the benefit of the employees who will share profits in much the same way that the John Lewis Partnership does today.

There will be no fixed holidays or opening/closing times for schools.  They will simply have to operate according to the wishes of their customers - the parents!  At exactly the same time every year, all pupils will sit a series of exams covering the following subjects: Mathematics, English Language, History, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science and Biology.  Obviously, primary school pupils will sit a smaller series of subjects.  However, each exam, on each subject, for each year at school, will be the same for everyone.  The exams will be set by a single independent examination board appointed by tender for a period of 10 years when the tender will be opened for re-bidding.  A separate company will run the marking of these examinations and again they will tender for the contract for a 10 year period.  The examinations will become progressively more testing year on year and will end at the end of Year 4 at secondary school.  There-after, more specialist exams will be offered - but on the same basis.  There will be no special 'O' or 'A' Level exams, the year by year ones will more than adequately tell universities the abilities of their applicants.  All examination results will be published and by law the results will have to be displayed publicly in each school and forwarded to the parents.

There will be no hindrance to schools wishing to teach subjects outside the official curriculum, such as music, wood-working, foreign languages, plumbing, drama or whatever,  but they may well have to charge for them.  Pupils will be free to leave after they are 15 years of age.  If schools go broke they will be on offer to any other school, or any other company or individual to buy up.  One last thing, teachers will not necessarily require teaching diplomas.  Obviously the school governors are more likely to require them but they are free to choose non-qualified teachers if they think they can do the job and if they think the customers (parents) will not mind.  Needless to say, there will be no national wage for teachers any more than there are for electricians or salesmen!

La Trahison des 'Clerks'!

My mis-spelling above is, for once, deliberate.  The original French phrase, la trahison des clercs, means literally  'the treason of the scholars' but more generally, 'the treason of the intellectuals'.  Well, no surprise there, then!  But in my version, I use the word 'clerks' in the English sense, meaning all those pecksniffs, jobsworths and jumped-up pox-doctor's clerks who breed like maggots on the bureaucratic body of our daily life and whose greed, idleness and arrogance is fast approaching the limit of acceptability.  As always, it is the 'little things that mean a lot', such as the report yesterday that vast numbers of un-civil servants employed by Swindon Council are on extended 'sick' leave with full pay, that we now have a Quango chairman on a salary in excess of £1 million, that another council has forbidden its employees to smoke during their legal breaks, that the loonies are obviously in charge of the NHS asylum which is the only explanation for their habit of loosing even more loonies on to the streets to execute their murderous fantasies, that most Social non-Workers couldn't recognise a battered child even if it was dead, and so on, and so on, ad nauseum!  It would help a little if these useless parasites showed just a smidgeon of humility, but not a bit of it, they demand even greater powers and authority with which to boss the rest of us around and never cease to complain and threaten strike action over what they consider, but no-one else does, to be their poor terms of employment.  (See John Brissenden's recent moans and groans from the stratified elevation of so-called Higher Education in which he teaches something utterly useless to the utterly dim!)

It really is time for a cull and I shall be placing my proposals before you in my next 5-hour speech as your  'Dear Leader'.  (PAY ATTENTION AT THE BACK THERE!)

Damned Dane!

Sorry, sorry, sorry - for the lack of posts recently, that is.  I have been wrestling in the mud of my ignorance with the likes of Dover Wilson, Harley Granville-Barker, Wilson Knight, the Arden edition, my cast and just about anyone else you can think of who knows more about this bloody play than I do!  Honestly, it's almost embarrassing the number of misconceptions I had concerning Hamlet. 

Let's start with this one.  I always thought that Hamlet was supposed to be hesitant and irresolute.  As a very small salve to my ignorance there are still people who do, but not me, not now.  Hamlet was as much of an 'action man' as Laertes, or his dear, departed Dad but, as a Renaissance 'New Man' he wasn't prepared to rely simply on gut re-action.  What was the point, he asks, of possessing "that capability and godlike reason" if you didn't use it?  Shakespeare's society had evolved slowly out of the Stygian gloom of the Dark Ages into the grim, superstitious barbarities of the Medieval and was now perceiving the first sunlight of the Renaissance Age in which reasoning and contemplation were beginning to be enjoyed - not least by the new and burgeoning bourgeois class of lawyers, small business-men, Protestant converts and the like who formed such an important part of the audience at the new Globe Theatre.  (Our hero, of course, studied at Wittenberg, a Protestant univerity!)  They were now relatively free to think and contemplate and they wanted to see plays in which the 'hero' was more than just a brave, virtuous knight in shining armour.  They wanted to see and hear him struggle with the complex, contradictory concepts that puzzled them, too.

Revenge, as a motivation for murderous action has more or less slipped away today because we have eschewed it in favour of allowing the state to act on our behalf - with the utterly predictable result that the state has failed in its duty, but that's another argument for another day.  The only revenge we experience is at second-hand with the so-called 'honour killings' of our Asian neighbours, a practise that would have passed unremarked in medieval England.  Laertes's instant and unthinking response to the question of what he is prepared to do about Hamlet who has killed his father and driven his sister insane is to say, "Cut his throat i' the church"!  That was the old way, the proper way, the traditional way, dare one say, the conservative way (small 'c', of course, the current crop of so-called Conservatives are only good for the metaphorical stabbing of a woman in the back - but I digress).  However, it was not Hamlet's way - until he had definite proof.  Again, the question for him was why possess the faculty of reasoning if one is supposed to re-act like an automatum, or, to use his imagery, like "a beast".  The proof once gained, however, he acts, or re-acts, with medieval ferocity - and that is part of his tragedy!

Indeed, it is (it seems to me) exactly that duality, what Californian gurus would call the 'yin and yang', between the possibilities contained in  "what a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form"  and the brutish, animal-like re-action of "Cut his throat i' the church" , that fascinates Shakespeare in this play.  It is not the most original of insights when I say that in the later plays Shakespeare became more and more interested in philosophy, or, to be precise, in subjects that were philosophical by their nature.  But, if it is hard to write a tome on philosophy (and sometimes to read it!), imagine how intensely difficult it is to write a play in which you must construct a believable plot and tell it in a way that will beguile, fascinate, thrill and engage an audience.  You  can see that some of the difficulty emerges (but not in Hamlet) in the way Shakespeare's verse structure becomes more and more fractured in the later plays, as he struggles to express complex thoughts in strict iambic pentameters.   

The important thing in Shakespeare, I am learning, is that what appears on the surface  is but a fraction of what is hidden beneath.  It was directing Troilus and Cressida that first opened my eyes to his partially-hidden profundities.  Everyone says that it is a play about love and war, which it is, but those motifs are merely two hooks upon which Shakespeare hangs his philosophical hat whilst he explores all sorts of abstruse philosophical arguments.  Hamlet is similar; on the face of it, a somewhat melodramatic revenge thriller, but beneath that theme of revenge, oh dear, what complexities lie in wait for the unwary director.

Dear Leader Duff #1

By an overwhelming majority of 100% of the votes - well, 1 For, 0 Against - I have decided to accede to popular demand and stand at the next election.  It's really none of your concern but in the spirit of generosity for which I am famed the length and breadth of my study, I have graciously decided to provide you all with the main points of my platform in suitably small portions over the next few weeks so that your midget minds can cope with the breathtaking width of my political vision.  I shall begin, as all potential politicians should, with financial matters.

Flat Tax: As I skimmed one of the daily rags the other day, I noticed an item reporting that the book containing the British tax regulations ran to 7,000 pages - or it might have been 700,000, or even, given the Treasury's 'C-' in sums, 7 Trillion pages!  I imagine that crawling all over this dusty, gigantic tome are the ever-fattening, money-gorged maggots otherwise known as Tax Consultants; the sort of low-life slugs with whom one would not wish to have dinner but are, alas, a required necessity if you live on much more than the State pension or the minimum wage but who are, of course, so hideously expensive that only the very rich can afford them - which is why, by and large, the very rich pay less tax than you and I.  Not the least of the advantages of a Flat Tax system is that these Tax Consultants would be out of work in an instant and forced to toss hamburgers at MacDonald's.  Yet another advantage would be that the price of collecting tax would drop like a stone, not least because you could, at a rough estimate (a system well-known at H.M. Treasury) , sack two thirds of the slackers, jobsworths and pension-for-life lay-abouts currently employed at vast expense in the Revenue and Customs Department and set them to work tossing hamburgers at you know where with you know who!

But, dear voter, there is one other extra-delicious advantage to be savoured by the advancement of the Flat Tax system.  Socialists, who on the whole lie even to themselves, maintain with pained, sincere hypocrisy that they are not taxing the rich out of spite and envy, oh dear me no, it's just that they have so much money and it really is needed desperately to pay for, er, things like, oh, you know, staff at the Revenue and Customs Department and that sort of thing!  However, a Flat Tax system actually collects more tax, more cheaply and the poor pay nothing although the rich are taxed less.  And it is precisely that point which sticks in the throats of your average socialist and brings up all the bile of class hatred and spite with which they are over-endowed.  You see, dear voter, when it comes down to it they don't really give a stuff about a sensible way of collecting more tax for them to waste on their pet projects, all they want to do is just rob the rich.

Well, there you have it - the first shot in my electoral campaign - and already I feel a movement beginning - and that will be quite enough of that, 'Dr. Teabag', I'm doing the jokes!

The ticking bomber!

Some time ago I began , shall we say, a lively conversation in a series of posts on the subject of harsh treatment for terrorist suspects.  I explained that there was, indeed, a difference between harsh treatment and torture and I suggested that, whilst it was probably not required yet in the UK, policy makers should work out the details now and make them clear before they were required.

During the conversation, mention was made of that old justification for torture - the ticking bomb scenario - and several commenters, including myself, rather sniffed at it because of its inherent unlikelihood.  However, today we have seen almost exactly that scenario but instead of a ticking bomb, we have a ticking bomber, Dhiran Barot.  According to Sky News, the security services first gained knowledge of Barot's activities when a senior AQ activist was captured in Pakistan.  Now, I have no evidence to support any pejorative accusation against that splendid body of men, the Pakistani police force.  Gentlemen to a man, as far as I'm concerned, but it must be admitted that they are unlikely to be regular readers of, say, The Guardian and may, therefor, be unversed in the finer sensibilities of what passes for western liberal thought.  Oh, let's not piss about, they almost certainly gave him, in the words of an ethnic Indian superintendent I knew in Singapore SB, "a bloody good walloping"!  As a result a raid was mounted against a Pakistani house in which shots were exchanged and the defenders arrested or killed.  In the house computers were found and on one of them was the first clue to Dhiran Barot's plans.  Happily, the Pakistani security services passed on the info to our people at MI5.  The rest is history, as is Dhiran Barot, thank God, or Allah (delete, as necessary).

Now, two questions remain pointed firmly in the direction of liberals, in general, and Craig Murray, in particular.  Mr. Murray, you will recall, is the darling of the 'Trot-lot' Left because, as an ambassador, he made a stink about MI6 gaining information via the disgraceful activities of the Uzbekistan police force who would consider "a bloody good walloping" to be downright sissy!  So, the questions for the liberals are this, and remember, we are not talking of an hypotheses but a real-life scenario:

Would you refuse to accept any information gained via means that were not in accord with International Human Rights?

How would you live with yourself if Barot had succeeded in his aims?

St. Norman of Geras leads us to 'The Battle'.

Anyone interested in warfare, in general, and Napoleonic warfare, in particular, should gallop over to Norman Geras's site to read an excellent review by Jules Crittenden of a new book on Waterloo, The Battle by Alessandro Barbero.  Whilst I disagree with one tiny comment by Crittenden (the British were not "badly beaten" at Quatre Bras although they might have been if Ney had been more energetic, and they only withdrew when it was clear that Blucher and the Prussians had been thrashed down the road at Ligny), apart from that, he makes the book appear to be a 'must have' for Christmas.  (Thanks to 'Norm'!)

Suffer little children!

I am obliged to Mike Cunningham of Fire, Pillage and Plague for this post in which he reminds us of an historical scene from that long-running, side-splitting farce, the British judicial system.  I call it 'historical' because although it is only a few years ago, it is already sinking out of the consciousness of virtually everyone.  Read it, but beware, the details are graphic and nauseating!

I am glad Mike printed it, however, because it has prompted me to 'tap the keys' once again on the subject of the death penalty.  It is always dangerous to draw hard conclusions from news headlines but it seems to me this year that there has been a steady, constant, almost week-by-week litany of wilful murder in which several of the murderers have not been content simply to slay the the object of their hatred but to add in for good measure the children and any other members of the family who are to hand.  Well, in for a penny, in for a pound - and under our judicial system, out in, say, 8 years with chances for an encore!  It's too early to see the murder rates for this year but the deeds of my house are on yet another big increase over the already alarming, year on year rise in the body count since the early '60s when the death penalty was abolished.  And after 40-odd years, still the liberals stand proudly on the mountainous pile of bodies made up of the innocents shot, beaten, burnt and stabbed to death because murderers now have nothing, absolutely nothing, to fear as a consequence of their actions.  (And be warned, if anyone comes on here and tells me that prison is no soft option and that it can be very, very tough being kept warm and dry and watching TV for a few years, I may resort to bad language - and as a frequent visitor to Dr. 'Teabag's' site, I have learnt a lot of it!)

It is also appropriate to raise the subject again given the craven, hypocritical response of our 'dear leader' yesterday on the subject of whether or not Saddam should hang.  Here is a man capable of launching several wars and thus sentencing to death hundreds of the best of our young men (although they took the Queen's shilling so they've nothing to complain about), to say nothing of countless innocent Iraqis, jibbing at the prospect of hanging a mass-murderer.  I have, many a time and oft, echoed the sentiments of the late Auberon Waugh in his assessment that politicians are, in general, a bunch of psychotic misfits, part of whose brains were damaged at birth.

"Now then, now then, come quietly Mr. Blair, there's a good gentleman!"

Well, it's been a long time coming, and as we all know, when you want a copper there are never any around, but any day now one of them is going to knock, knock, knock on that beautifully painted front door of No. 10.  According to Simon Walters, the veteran political correspondent of The Mail on Sunday, the 'old Bill' have found a "killer e-mail" linking Tony "Hey, most people think I'm a pretty straight sort of a guy" Blair to to the cash for honours crime.  He reports that Blair and his cronies are in a total funk at the very real possibility that the prime minister will be arrested.  One can but hope, but, oh, what joy and festivities there will be for Christmas if, not only do they get their man but also pick up a few leading Tories as well, plus, nicking the leadership of the il-Lib-non-Dems for receiving, and hanging on like grim death to, stolen money.

My cup, at Christmas lunch, will overfloweth - probably with the carefully kept 1975 Chateau Montrose that has been awaiting the right celebratory moment.

Oh, what a lovely war!

By and large, taken in the round and all in all, as it were, propaganda makes for lousy theatre! That is why the works of the odious Berthold Brecht raise tedium to the level of a 'cruel and unusual punishment'.  Similarly, but not, I confess, at quite the same extreme level, the somewhat pathetic, hand-wringing opinions of David Hare, as discerned dimly through the trite hymns to New Labour that he pretends are plays, give cause to fits of yawning capable of dislocating one's jaw.  I have just sat numbed with boredom through a (good) production of his much-acclaimed "Racing Demon", a work of such stupefying superficiality that it makes some of the old Monty Python sketches in which they gently ragged the C of E appear in retrospect to be really rather profound.  How that man has built such a reputation as a playwright defies understanding until, that is, one remembers that it has been gained almost entirely at the 'Royal Nationalised Theatre', in which sundry, soppy socialists sit around on my money thinking of different ways to tell me that Tories are rotters and Tony Blair is a saint.

However, it must be admitted that agit-prop in films does work very much better than theatre.  Perhaps it is the speed of the medium in which one is not given time to think too long, or too hard.  Visual film images are so 'real' and so enormously powerful that they almost paralyse critical faculties.  Alright, alright, I know - so far so bleedin' obvious - as any spotty undergraduate with a 'degree' in Media Studies would be able to tell us.  However, it has just loomed rather large in my limited mind because I have just sat through the film, "Oh What a Lovely War" which I haven't seen for about 30 years.  It is a historical travesty and a tendentious piece of political propaganda but, upon my soul (if I have one), it is an excellent piece of film-making and in places it rises to the level of what one might call 'high art'.  Seeing it again, I remembered scenes I had never forgotten, of the French Cuirrassiers on the roundabout horses; Maggie Smith as the alluring music-hall star urging the men to volunteer, alluring that is, until in close-up you see her aged, raddled and painted face; the Australian troops singing their sardonic song "One staff officer jumps over another staff officer's back" and in the background you see the staff doing precisely that ... and so on, and so on.  All terrifically imaginative, all ramming home the message - and all, like a spy's cover story, containing just enough truth to give it an air of respectability and believability.

Entirely spurious, of course, life always being more complicated, ambiguous and difficult than agit-prop would have us believe.  Still and all (as our American cousins say), it was brilliantly done and who could forget that final shot of the thousands upon thousands of white crosses covering acres of countryside?