London: The Odyssey Begins
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soldiers in the crowd. Perhaps it was the faces of these young,
earnest men and women, or perhaps it was the nostalgic memory of my choir-singing days as a boy in the Old World—but
I was deeply stirred. I joined them, singing the hymns I had
learned in Sunday school in Mineola. I felt, somehow, that I
belonged with these, the underprivileged and unheralded.
Around me were men and women who for years had lived
in the cavernous depths of subway tunnels, survived the diet
of fish paste and horse meat, wore the same clothes months
on end, and faced every conceivable hardship with fortitude.
They could never be truly crushed or defeated. If such a people still kept faith in their nation and faith in their God, and
prayed to Him with hymns under a drizzle that chilled me to
the bone—then such a people, I felt, with God's help should
and would live forever. For this was the home of freemen, of
brave and devout men. The last vision I have of Hyde Park is
that of the lean Englishman in the Bowery coat using a
stubby pencil as baton, leading the group in Abide With Me.
I felt that was the real Englishman, the real England. Not
the imperialistic England of ruthless colonial rule, not the
England of the British lion, its tail twisted by Eire, Iran, and
others yet to come, nor yet that of the English bulldog snarling at the dark peoples of the world, but an England of pious,
humble, kindly men and women. As I saw it, there was much
to be condemned in their tolerance of the immoral international standards set by their Foreign and Colonial offices, but
I felt that whatever they, the people, undertook to do, they
would do calmly, without hysteria. They had faith in their
country, in their God, and in themselves.
Early the next morning I visited a physician and was inoculated against cholera. At noon I was aboard a plane flying
east—eastward via Switzerland to Cairo, heart of the Moslem
world, neighbor to the Holy Land now preparing for a lifeand-death struggle on an ancient battlefield.