Blimey!

Gurgled a Tommy: "You'd think sentiment like that would turn your stomach. But blimey, it's marvelous." Beamed the Daily Mail: "Riotously amusing." Even the thunderous Times felt that it offered "valuable lessons to the English music hall." Overnight Irving Berlin's This Is The Army was a London smash.

With flashbulbs exploding, Lady Louis Mountbatten and Ambassadors Winant and Biddle in a flag-draped box, and Noel Coward, Bea Lillie and mobs of servicemen packing the house, it was a gala opening. It was also a demonstrative one: time after time cascading applause stopped the show. Loudest thunder was for Composer Berlin, who followed a husky rendering of Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning with one husky chorus of White Christmas. When the audience still would not let him go, he gave them a new bit of alien corn called My British Buddy, which at week's end most of London was whistling:

We're as different as can be;

He thinks he's winning the war

And I think it's me.

But we're in there pitching

And on one thing we agree:

When the job is done

And the war is won

We'll be clasping hands across the sea.

My British Buddy . . .

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.