'Our Leader Falls for It'

A story based wholly or in part on a trip to the Dalmation coast by Bates and his wife in February 1938.

In both the story and in Bates's account in The Blossoming World (pp. 331-335), the Bateses find themselves in the company of an earnest 'sheep-like' party of Germans, led by a man Bates nicknames 'our Fuehrer...a little courier of peremptory voice and manner who would have done credit to the author of Mein Kampf himself.' Both the party and their leader mistakenly take the Bates as newlyweds; the title reflects the story's end, when 'Now, for the first time, we could tell our Fuehrer something he did not know. "We have three children," we said'.

In The New Zealand Herald (July 8, 1939, p. 15), The Daily News (Perth, November 18, 1939, p. 7)