Chapter 2

Once upon a time there was a Father who was devoted to his child. He fed it and nursed it and watched it grow and gave it toys to play with--both soldiers and boats. Also he made it promises that some day he would extend their house and garden until no house and garden were bigger. Every year he took it to the top of a high precipice and showed it beautiful lands and water which should some day be theirs.

The child had heard this promise so often that it used to ask, "When? when?" And always the answer was, "Some day, some day."

And then at last the day came, and the Father took the child to the high precipice yet once more, but behold it chanced that they both fell over and were smashed, the Father hopelessly and the child very, very badly, so that it would for long years or perhaps for evermore be a cripple.

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ONE OF OUR ALLIES.

Somewhere in France--no, let me be bold and say in Paris--there is a young French soldier named Charles. Less than two years ago he was a plumber and whole; to-day he has but one arm, his left; the other and a piece of his shoulder with it having gone in saving his country from the foe.

Charles is shy and very modest, and no bigger than so many French youths--he is only twenty-two--with dark-brown hair and blue eyes with very black centres, and a moustache that never succeeds in looking more than three weeks old. Being, however, brave, he does not let his maimed condition unduly trouble him, but runs his errands (all that he can now do) and whistles as he runs, and is glad to be alive at all, instead of dead, as so many of his comrades are and as his Colonel is, as I shall tell.

At the Front Charles's duties were these. A despatch--a _pli_, as they call it--would be given him either back of the lines to deliver in the trenches, or in the trenches to deliver back of the lines, and in order to get there, if fighting was in progress, it was necessary for him to crawl for perhaps one or two kilometres on his stomach. On a certain day of intense activity, Charles in his trench was handed one of these critical missives for the commanding officer, who was a kilometre or so behind, and this he placed in his satchel and then began the hazardous journey.

No one ever knows when the supreme moment of his life is coming; nor did Charles, but it was then.

This being a terrific day--as a matter of fact it was during the famous battle for the Maison du Passeur, when the French and Germans were losing and retaking trenches for hours--he had to crawl all the way, only to come suddenly upon the body of the commanding officer himself stretched dead in a carrot field.

To Charles's mind there was then but one thing to do, and that was, as he had been unable to deliver the message, to take it back to the sender. He therefore started on the return journey, and was only a few yards from his trench, and still un-hit, when he found a wounded officer on the ground. Here was a new problem, but necessarily having to stand up and throw aside all precautions, Charles got him as well as he could on his back and, still un-hit, half carried, half supported, him to the trench, and was at once away again with his despatch. It was at this moment that an exploding shell hurled the satchel from big hands and flung it on the open ground between the French trenches and the enemy's, which were here separated only by a few yards. At any cost the despatch must not fall into German hands, and Charles, who miraculously had not been injured by the explosion, began instantly to climb out of the trench to recover it, and this in spite of a sergeant, who called to him to keep under cover. But Charles, having one idea and one only, and that was to save from the foe the despatch that had been entrusted to him, succeeded in reaching it and securing it; and then came another shell that shattered his arm.

That is all he remembers; but he must have rolled back to the bottom of the trench, where he was found, two days later, still clutching the satchel. And after that, although he remembers the coffee he was given to drink, all is a haze until he came fully to himself in hospital and found that no longer had he a right arm.

Such is the story of Charles's effort for his country.

Now I do not claim for Charles that he is any braver or has a finer sense of duty than many another French soldier; but this I know, that when he recovered he was summoned to the Invalides to receive not only the _Croix de Guerre_ but the _Médaille Militaire_ with the palm, which corresponds to our Victoria Cross, and that now, although, having left the Army, he no longer wears uniform but merely such poor civilian clothes as he can afford as a messenger, when he walks along the Boulevards--which he does as seldom as he can, so shy is he--there is not an officer, seeing the ribbons on his coat, who does not salute this little plumber with as much punctilio as though he were General JOFFRE himself; and, blushing crimson, Charles returns the salute.

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"Mrs. Humphry Ward seems to have gone for inspiration to contemporary characters, and now in 'Tasker Jevons' it is difficult not to find the lineaments of a well-known writer."

_Evening Standard._

Quite so: and Miss MAY SINCLAIR made _A Great Success_ of it.

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NURSERY RHYMES OF LONDON TOWN.

II.--King's Cross.

King's Cross! What shall we do? His purple robe Is rent in two! Out of his crown He's torn the gems! He's thrown his sceptre Into the Thames! The Court is shaking In every shoe-- King's Cross! _What_ shall we do? _Leave him alone For a minute or two._

III.--Bishopsgate.

Bishopsgate Without, Bishopsgate Within! What a clamour at the gate, O what a din! Inside and outside The Bishops bang and shout, Outside crying, "Let me in!" Inside, "Let me out."

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* * * * *

THE ADJUTANT.

In that great Room which military error Has miscalled Orderly (for it is not, But full of tumult and debate and terror, And worried writers growing rather hot, For ever floundering in seas of chits And forms and counterfoils and wrathful writs), Alone unfevered mid the storm he sits And tells them all exactly what is what.

Who so alert to solve the frequent riddle, To judge if Jones should have his train-fare free, Whether the band requires another fiddle, And which is senior, Robinson or me? Who shall indite such circulars as his To Officers Commanding Companies About their musketry, or why it is So many men take sugar in their tea?

And when at times he shuns the sacred table And like some eagle swoops upon parade, Men mark his coming and there bursts a babel As with new zeal the subalterns upbraid, Lecture and illustrate, and on the right Form sullen squads, and hope they're being bright-- Save those white-livered ones who at the sight Hide their commands in some convenient glade.

For he is terrible; and few folk relish The words of doom which shake his diaphragm; Yet is the heart of him not wholly hellish, But in his playing-hours he's like a lamb; And who'd have said that one so skilled to strafe And, when I err, too truculent by half, Could own so rich, so rollicking a laugh, Would see so well how humorous I am?

Yet if with leave unasked I quit the barrack, Ever behind I dread that he will call, Speed up the street in some avenging Darracq Or on the Underground retrieve his thrall; Nor in my home can quite escape the spell But freeze with horror at the front-door bell, For fear the parlour-maid may speak my knell, May knock and say that _he_ is in the hall.

And, sleeping, still I have to brook his blusters; A monstrous Adjutant is always nigh At dream-reviews and endless dreamy musters, Laden with lists and schemes and syllabi; And, though he find no failing anywhere, But all are present and correct and fair, _I_ never fail to make the fellow swear, _I_ always seem to catch his horrid eye.

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TO THE GLORY OF FRANCE.

* * * * *

ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.

_Tuesday, March 21st._--Returning from Westminster this afternoon I stumbled in Whitehall upon a Member whom I had not seen in his place this Session. "Going down to the House?" I asked. "What, is it sitting?" he replied; and then it appeared that he was just home on short leave after working hard "somewhere on the Continent," and had no present interest in political controversy. As I reflected on a speech I had just listened to, it occurred to me that the attitude of some of the stay-at-home Members towards the War is much the same as that of my hon. friend towards the House. "What, is it still going on?"

If the Germans were in occupation of the Black Country, if Oxford were being daily shelled, as Rheims is, and if with a favouring breeze London could hear the dull rumble of the bombardment, as Paris can, I wonder if Members would still be encumbering the Order-paper with the sort of trivialities that now find place there.

An exception may be made in favour of Mr. JOE KING. He has discovered a little late in the day that a war is going on in Europe, and that it affects a little country called Belgium, whose neutrality was guaranteed by the Powers. He was anxious to know whether Belgium had formally renounced her neutrality, and was no doubt greatly surprised to learn from Sir EDWARD GREY that, owing to one of the guaranteeing Powers having invaded her, Belgium had become a belligerent.

I do not know whether Mr. PRINGLE was in the House when this announcement was made. But if so it evidently created no impression on his mind. In the debate on the Army Estimates he followed Captain TRYON, who had delivered an urgent appeal to the Government from the text, "A strong Army and a shorter War." Mr. PRINGLE'S ideal is just the reverse. In his view the Army is too big already, and is taking too great a toll from our industrial and commercial population. The great men who won the Napoleonic War--after twenty-three years--had not a big army; and the consequence was that, while it was going on, British trade expanded by leaps and bounds. To-day, owing to our disastrous military policy the demands upon our tonnage were so heavy that people had to go short of sugar and tobacco. Let us conserve our resources and be ready to dictate terms when Germany has been financially ruined. When Mr. PRINGLE at last sat down after three-quarters of an hour of this sort of thing I longed for ten minutes of Mr. BALFOUR at his best. But he was not present, and Mr. LONG was so much occupied in defending the Government against the charge of having broken faith with the married men that Mr. PRINGLE never got the trouncing he deserved.

_Wednesday, March 22nd._--One of the most cherished beliefs of the House of Commons is that upon the Second Reading of the Consolidated Fund Bill anything under the sun may be discussed. Colonel YATE was justly surprised, therefore, when the SPEAKER ruled that he was out of order in criticising the Indian Government for its conduct of the Mesopotamian Expedition, and advised him to reserve his remarks for the Indian Budget discussion--equivalent in these times to the Greek Kalends.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN was surprised too, but, regardless of the ruling, proceeded to make a carefully-prepared reply to the speech which the Hon. and gallant Member had not been allowed to deliver. He frankly admitted that there had been a lamentable breakdown of the hospital arrangements, but steps had been taken to improve them, and a telegram from General LAKE showed that the treatment of the men wounded in the recent engagement was satisfactory.

Mr. PEMBERTON-BILLING essayed another and a longer flight to-day, but had a good deal of engine trouble. His Parliamentary friends ought to have warned him that the House does not care to listen to a man reading extracts from his own leading articles, however prophetic they may have been; that the constant reiteration of a phrase such as "I would like to suggest, Mr. SPEAKER," soon becomes tiresome, and that to call somebody else "the De Rougemont of the air" is to invite the _tu quoque_. Members became more and more impatient as the orator became more and more dogmatic; and when he rhetorically demanded the name of "one man to whom we could turn to solve the problem" they derisively chorused, "BILLING!" Mr. TENNANT, recognising the feeling of the House, did not spend much time in refuting Mr. BILLING's wild assertions, but devoted most of his speech to replying to Mr. JOYNSON-HICKS, who had pleaded that the East-Coast towns should be more promptly warned of approaching air-raids. He had personally investigated the arrangements and was positively "staggered" at "the wonderful network that had been set up," and he invited Mr. JOYNSON-HICKS to come with him privately and share his amazement. Mr. ELLIS GRIFFITH was not convinced. He thought that there were still too many strands of red tape in the network, and reiterated the hope that the DERBY Committee would soon develop into a Ministry of the Air.

_Thursday, March 23rd._--A distressing report in the papers this morning, that the _Galloper_ had been blown up by the Germans, made the friends of Sir FREDERICK SMITH anxious. Had he, on one of his periodical visits to the trenches to see Friend WINSTON, stumbled across an enemy mine? Happily the report was grossly exaggerated. The _Galloper_ was only a light-ship, and had not been destroyed by the enemy but merely withdrawn by the Trinity House; and on the Treasury Bench this afternoon there was the ATTORNEY-GENERAL very much alive.

Mr. TREVELYAN had a motion on the paper condemning the administration of the Defence of the Realm Act, and in support of it produced a sheaf of cases, in which he said the Government had abused its powers. Among other acts of vile oppression they had ravished from her home, on September 1st, while her father was away shooting partridges, and had subsequently interned without trial, a young lady against whom no charge had been formulated. It sounded very dreadful, and someone called out, "Is this a Russian case?"

Then arose Sir F. E. SMITH, and with a few forensic gestures demolished the house of cards that Mr. TREVELYAN had so laboriously erected. Most of his cases were out of court because they had already been in court, the decisions he impugned being those of the magistrates. As for the daughter of the partridge-slayer she was an associate of a notorious German spy, and had come back from Switzerland with a message for one of his agents. As her case had been fully considered by the late HOME SECRETARY he suggested that Mr. TREVELYAN should talk to him about it.

This was the most pungent speech of the afternoon. The most amusing was that of Mr. GINNELL, who kept the House in fits of laughter for ten minutes while in his most rasping tones he jerked out epigrams against "this thing calling itself a Government." The Coalition was described as "two poisons blended, which could not make a wholesome drink." Never before has he had such a success. I only hope it will not turn his head and encourage him to attempt conscious humour.

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* * * * *

"The World at War at ---- Theatre Only."

_Advt. in Evening Paper._

We are relieved to find that the area of conflict has been so much restricted.

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FROM SOMEWHERE IN AFRICA.

We have just returned from another of those little expeditions which are becoming almost a habit with the ---- Frontier Force when in search of an enemy whose discretion is only rivalled by that of the German High Seas Fleet. We moved out four days ago with all the pomp of war--horse, foot and guns, ambulances and long trains of transport waggons, the fierce vivid fighting of the desert before us. We rode seventeen miles that day and camped at some wells. As we rolled ourselves in our blankets round the camp-fires to rest for the glorious contest of the morrow our hearts should have been filled with dreams of undying fame. But we were really wondering when the squadron transport would arrive with our porridge and sausages for breakfast.

Next morning we were in the saddle by 3 A.M., and after some ten or twelve hours of unbroken and undisputed progress we captured two Arab shepherds in charge of as many as eight sheep. This _succès fou_ was the cause of justifiable satisfaction.

In the first place we scented liver and bacon for breakfast. In the second place it seemed to promise a settlement of the long-standing dispute between me and the General. The General has a preposterous theory about the existence and hostility of a vast number of mythical Arabs in our immediate neighbourhood. Now this is obviously absurd. With the exception of three palm-trees, which belong to us, there is nothing but sand for about two hundred miles in all directions, and even an Arab cannot subsist entirely on sand. Of course, if there were any Arabs near us, they would be so enraged at finding themselves at a spot two hundred miles from anything except sand that they would be violently hostile to anyone, especially to the people who had engaged the only three palm-trees in the neighbourhood. But it is their existence that I dispute with the General. It is true he took a most unfair dialectical advantage, about a fortnight ago, by having a large battle. But my contention is that the enemy on this occasion were merely orange-sellers from the nearest town, hired by the General for the purpose of argument.

These two shepherds, however, did seem to support his theory of the existence of Arabs, but as to their hostility there was still room for doubt. They were both extraordinarily old and unbelievably dirty. Also they were, as was very natural, extremely frightened. Seeing that they knew themselves to be the only living people for quite a number of miles round, it must have appeared to them that the entire ---- Frontier Force had come out solely for the purpose of capturing them, and that, as it had ridden some forty miles to do it, it would not be in a good temper. It was therefore rather hard to judge of their hostility, because as soon as they were confronted with the General and the interpreter they gave one yell of "Allah!" and fell flat, face downwards, in the sand, from which position they refused to move. They would not even budge when the interpreter took all their clothes off with a view to searching them. They probably thought this was merely a preliminary to skinning them. When they were finally induced to speak, I believe they were understood to say that we were the first men they'd seen for eight years. I don't wonder they were frightened. If you have lived all your life all alone in the middle of a howling desert with Grandfather it's a very frightening thing when a complete Frontier Force marches forty miles for the sole purpose of capturing you.

But the day's excitement was not over yet. Towards evening I took my troop off at a gallop in person and captured a camel. It was a very young camel, hardly bigger than a sheep on stilts, and it cried like a child at the sight of me. This, I hope, was not so much due to my frightful appearance in my red moustaches as to the fact that it had probably never seen a man at all (not being eight years old), let alone an army.

The curious aversion which it conceived for my moustache threatened to hold up the entire Frontier Force for the rest of the day, for it would neither be led nor driven. Fortunately, however, we had a very black Soudanese camel-driver with us as guide, and he came and spat at it, which soothed it considerably, and it followed him like a lamb. We got it back to camp next day and it is tied up near my tent. It has apparently made up its mind to waive the moustache question, and we now spit at one another in the friendliest fashion whenever I pass. I hope in time to train it to bring up my bath water in the morning from the three palm-trees.

_Later._--The camel was the last episode of the campaign, and we returned to ---- yesterday. The total bag of a four days' expedition was--sheep, 8; shepherds, 2; camel, 1. The human section was subsequently released on the grounds that their political views were satisfactory.

* * * * *

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ON THE MENACE OF HOME-BAKERY.

["Women _can_ bake bread if they will. It is much easier than trimming hats."--_"Housewife," in "The Daily News."_]

Aminta, be not led away By words that sanguine women say; Though simpler be the baking bread Than trimming gear for your fair head, Let your concern remain, I ask, The sterner and the nobler task.

The nobler task: I'll tell you why. Shall Bloggs, our baker, wilt and die For loss of trade, his brood of eight Left destitute and desolate? And must _I_ perish 'neath the stress Of culinary frightfulness?

No, dear. The millinery art Is where I'd have you play your part; For, though your hats may work intense Despite on my aesthetic sense, Whatever pain their crudeness brings At least I needn't eat the things.

* * * * *

COMMERCIAL CANDOUR.

"You never know your luck when you get our FRUIT."--_Advt. in Irish Paper._

* * * * *

"_Mr. Hayes._ Certainty is defined in Webster as the maximum of our expectations. (Loud laughter.)

_The Judge_ (_laughing_). Let us get on. This is more like _Punch_ than anything else. (Laughter.)"--_Pall Mall Gazette._

It will now have to be called the Supreme Court of Punch and Judicature.

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PULP FAMINE NOTICES.

(_A Hint to Reviewers._)

A WRITER in a recent issue of _The Daily Chronicle_ prefaces a column of novel notices with the following remarks: "The smaller papers consequent upon the famine in 'pulp' have made the reviewing of the new novels rather a job, but at least it is possible to give news of them."