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By A. A. Milne, published in the January 1919 issue of The Green Book, a literary journal by and for staff of British Military Intelligence unit MI7b, which created propaganda during World War I. The journal was recently discovered in the papers of Captain James Price Lloyd, who worked with Milne in the unit, by Lloyd’s great-nephew Jeremy Arter. The poem is a parody of the song “Under the Greenwood Tree,” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

In M.I.7.B.,
Who loves to lie with me
About atrocities
And Hun Corpse Factories:
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy,
But sit all day and blether.


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February 1927

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