  One by one the idols of tradition go by the board. William Tell’s Apple and Paul Revere’s Ride were long ago cast into the trash-basket of Fiction; even Joan of Arc has been received into the mythology of Sainthood, and now that hero of our happy childhood, Casablanca, the boy who stood on the burning deck, is about to be snatched from us by that reckless iconoclast, Mr. Irvin Cobb. Like the ruthless Woodman in the poem, Mr. Cobb has struck his axe into the very roots of this revered tree of our childish belief? According to Cobb, the Casabianca-tree is only a nut tree and a horsechestnut tree at that. Writing in the Saturday Evening Post, he tells us that Casabianca was nothing more than a “feeble-minded leatherhead.” If that be so then Barbara Frietchie was a leatherhead, and Edith Cavell, and all the host of those who gave up or were ready to give up their lives for that purely imaginary thing, an ideal, and what could the blessed Evangelist have been thinking of when he wrote “He that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” John 12:25. Exactly two thousand years ago when the city of Pompeii was destroyed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a Roman sentinel, another idol of tradition just such a leatherhead as Casablanca, refused to desert his post and was burned to death for the very foolish reason that he was “on duty.” He is there to this day, standing “at attention,” in the shape of a cast made from the matrix of molten lava that enveloped his living . . . . Nevertheless there are two sides to every question, and it is quite possible that Casabianca may have been a perfectly sensible lad, whose only thought was to disobey his captain and desert his post, but the tar melting from the heat in the seams of the deck, and adhering to his feet caused him to stick to the ship. Be that as it may, I shall stick to Casabianca! Decorative illustration drawing of a stylised face
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