The Wilmington morning star., 1943-12-27
BY WEsTBROOK PEGLER

NEW YORK,-The new and nationalistic
now retired and apparently repudiated, prob
ably is more poetic in Russian than in the
rather shapless English translations. 1t easily
could be. wish they had told me more about
it, for l have an interest IL such matters
dating back to a time when ! was doing
sports and got an assignment to check the
origin of American college cheers and var
sity songs. Who wrote the words and music,
and were done to order or by spontaneous
inspiration?
l mean offense to our gallant ally in re-
marking that there are office poets in many
OF our newspaper shops VINO could do at
least as well against a Stop-Watch, unless
it could be that in the Russian language
these possess a fire and rhythm that is lost
in translation, although poetry or verse has
gone out Of fashion in daily journalism since
the heydey Of Bert Lesion Taylor, Franklin
P. Adams, Jimmy Montague ard a man in
Pittsburg named Alexander who was very
good though less well known Thu Germans,
back in the early stages Of Hitlerjsm, tried to
adapt the American institution OF the col
lege yell and turned out some pretty awful
efforts, but that was not strange consider
ing that the model which they were trying to
initiate is itself so CHASTITY puerlle that one
must be either fairly drunk very young
to utter the same. Their Nazi varsity cheers,
so to speak, were full of oraggadocio and
threats and the phrase victory, hail. had
silly sound to American ears, although
perhaps we should have taken it more serious
ly at the time. Still, they could not have been
more idiotic than our "zlng, get a rat-trap,
bigger than cat-trap''. which has been adopt
ed by many of our colleges and high schools
with intent to inspire the molsskin warriors,
as the football men used TO be called, and
our sis-boom-bahs and locomotives
Old Professor William Lyon Philips Of Yale
came through with the information that in
American college life these yells originated
one autum afternoon at New Haven when
non-combatant freshmen who had been out
watching the football practice began to sound
off the cadence of the creek frogs chorus
the way back to town and thus gave Yale
the historic brek-ek-ek co-aae, and so forth.
But it seems likely that the British hip-hip-
hooray goes back further. Many of their alb
surdties do
Patriotic songs certainly do tend to be
corny and none can have been more so
than the popular numbers that were turned
out by the tin-pan alley Of Rome when Mus
soini was sending his biaskshirts to Abys-
slnla, IN war wage, as you may remember,
not to conquer but to iberate the enslaved
subjects of the Negus. Ore of them record
ed at the time, called Little Black Face,
ran:
If you look from the highlands to
the sea,
Little Black Face, slave among slaves,
You will see, as in beautiful dream
tri-color unfurl for you.
Our law is the bondage of love,
But freedom of life and thought.
We blackshirts will! free you
Little black-face kbysslnian belle.
They had half dozen others as bad Or if
possible, worse but patriotic music, until it's
aged, is likely to be raw and Jagged. Har-
vard with the most poetic college anthem of
them all, through all these years had been
singing it to the borrowed air of Believe Me
If All Those Endearing Young Charms. 1t
is only so per cent home grown
In the translation, the New Russian num-
Der reminds me of a travesty that wrote
few years ago to insicate the pontlessness
and confusion of much that is regarded as
poetry. 1t was a heroic thing, entitled Night
Over Jugo-Slavia and, as I pointed out, it
started nowhere, went nowhere and said
nothing Yet in few days there came an
ecstatic letter from Serbian patriot in Cleve-
land containing a translation into his own
language, and requesting permission to set
IL 10 music to be sung by {, local Serbian
patrlouc ssGiety. He said it perfectly ex-
pressed the fierce and noble nationalism of
his people.