Series 03: John Brady Nash letters, January 1914-December 1915 - Page 589
Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 589]
"The artist, author of that belt, none such
Before, produced, or after. ...".
Our men are proud of their belts and any one returned from Galipoli, who had a full set of Turkish buttons was considered to be fortunate indeed with his possession. No doubt the warriors of old had the same ideas of emulation 'mongst themselves. Each of them is described to us in such manner as conveys to the mind that their size of body was much greater and their individual strength much in excess of that belonging to the present-day man. Mayhap the poet is responsible for this, the disparity being the outcome of the poetical imagination, in reality there being no facts proving its existance; it is more than likely that, taken as a class, the fighting men of those times were physically inferior to the best of our time. Certain it is that their exploits, in regard to travel, were puny compared with what is commonplace in the 19th & 20th Centuries. Homer & Virgil have made journeys immortal which for distance North & South but crossed the Mediterranean Sea, while East and West their utmost limits reached from Troy – Dardanus – to Carthage. We in tis ship, Ismailia, will, fortune favouring, have travelled in forty-eight hours what took the ships of the ancients more than a year to traverse. Then knowledge and information spread but slowly, and exageration in regard to detail was much more likely than under the conditions now existing.
8 p.m. – Some one is playing