Grabberwoch Came Göring
It was an odds-on bet that Alice in Wonderland could not keep out of the war very long once Great Britain got in. Last week news of an extraordinary Triple Alliance—Lewis Carroll, Adolf Hitler and the British Broadcasting Corp. reached the U. S. Alice had become a wild satire called Adolf in Blunderland, a skit that ably combined entertainment value with rib-tickling, moral-upping, home propaganda value.
Prologue:
'Twas Danzig, and the Swastikoves
Did heil and kittle in the Reich . . .
He took his Aryan horde in hand,
Long time the Gestapo he taught;
Then rested he by the Baltic Sea
And stood awhile in thought.
And as a Polish oath they swore,
The grabberwoch with eyes aflame
Came göring down the Corridor
And goebbeled as it came . . .
It is fairy time in Russia. Mrs. Stalin is talking to her little son, Junior.
Mrs. Stalin: "You remember, little Adolf had followed the White von Ribbit into a hole. . . . He cried and cried, till there was a big pool of water, and he got so tiny that he fell in with a splash."
Adolf: "Dear, dear! How queer everything is today. But if I am not myself, who am I? Well, I'm sure I'm not Bismarck, for his hair was bristly and mine falls in a beautiful bang right over my left eye. And I can't be Napoleon, because he retreated from Moscow. . . . Oh, dear! I wish I could get my thoughts straight. Maybe it would help if I could hear the party catechism:
How doth the Nazi crocodile
Improve his Lebensraum—
By teaching Germans how to heil
In all lands that allow 'em! . . .
How happily he drags them in
To join his robber band,
Then says to Mr. Chamberlain
'This is my last demand.'"
Soon Adolf finds himself wandering in a garden—"Berchtesgarden, you know"—and comes on a mushroom which turns out to be a small atlas globe with a tall, thin, umbrella-bearing caterpillar on it. Adolf has an uncomfortable suspicion. He becomes excited, and begins to shout about negotiations with "Those dirty Jewish Eskimos." To quiet him, the caterpillar suggests a poem:
"You are old, Kaiser Wilhelm," young Adolf said,
"And your hair has become very white.
Yet you've been chopping wood since the day that you fled,
Do you do it for muscle or spite?"
"In my youth," Kaiser Wilhelm replied to the lad,
"Just like you, I thought I was divine;
And now that you know what you're in for, you cad,
Shall I build you a house next to mine?"
Caterpillar: "What size do you want to be?"
Adolf: "Oh, I'm not particular as to size, so long as I'm bigger than the British Empire and the French Empire and the Dutch Empire and Belgium and the Balkans all rolled into one. You see, 90,000,000 people is"
To grow bigger Adolf breaks off and munches a piece of the globe labeled Poland. He wanders off. He comes to the house of the March Into, who is having substitute tea with the Mad Flatterer and the Doormat.
Adolf: "What is substitute tea?"
March Into: "You mean you don't know what it is? Then you don't say what you mean."