Chapter 3

"DEAR OLD TOP,--This is the best news I have heard for a long time. I always knew you would bring it off soon; but I wasn't prepared for anything quite so sudden. There is, of course, only one thing to do when a man fulfils his destiny in this way. The custom is immemorial, and, war or no war, we must crack a bottle. Tell me where you would like to dine, and when, and I'll fix it up, and some jolly show afterwards. Occasions like This must be celebrated.

"I am, yours, etc.,--."

So far it is a somewhat feeble narrative, nor has it any point beyond the circumstance that I posted the letters in the wrong envelopes.

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WHAT TO DO WITH OUR CRITICS.

"The Ministry of Munitions has for disposal approximately 75 TONS WEEKLY of PRESS MUD."--_Advt. in "The Engineer."_

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"In consequence of the epidemic at the Royal Naval College, Osborne, in the spring of this year, it has been decided to reduce the number of cadets at the College from 500 to 300. This reduction will not affect the numbers to be entered, as a larger number of cadets will be accommodated at Dartmouth Colliery."--_Scotsman_.

Where they will be trained, we suppose, as mine-sweepers.

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* * * * *

* * * * *

"GOG."

(_TO THE AUTHOR OF "JONG," PUNCH, SEPTEMBER 19TH._)

O singer sublime of Beeyah-byyah-bunniga-nelliga-jong, It isn't envy, the green and yellow, That makes me take up my lyre, old fellow, And burst with a fierce cacophonous bellow Across the path of your song. I want to propose another name, Unknown to you and unknown to fame; It is like the sound of a hand-sawn log Or the hostile hark of a husky dog: Chagogagog-munchogagog-chabun-agungamog!

This cracker of jaws is a lake, I'm told, A lake in the U.S.A., And first the Indians, the red sort, owned it, But later to Uncle Sam they loaned it, Who afterwards made no bones, but boned it In the fine Autolycus way; And though life wasn't a matter vital He kept with the lake its rasping title, Which recalls the croak of an amorous frog Or a siren heard in an ocean fog: Chagogagog-munchogagog-chabun-agungamog!

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THE BUTTERFLY.

"Two thousand cabbage butterflies have been captured by Huntingdon school-children, but more stern measures for their capture must be introduced."--_Evening Paper_.

In order to capture the cabbage butterfly the first thing to do is to interest the creature by giving it a cabbage-leaf to play with. Then take the kitchen-chopper in the right hand, lift it high and bring it down with a crash on the third vertebra. Few butterflies repeat any offence after this is severed.

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THE INVINCIBLE ARGENTINE.

"There is a most useful Navy, including two or three super-Dreadnoughts, and the best-bred racehorses in the world."--_Irish Times_.

* * * * *

"Further instructions as regards the allowance to householders which have increased in size will be issued later. The issue of temporary cards is under consideration."--_Food Control Notice in "Liverpool Daily Post."_

"Who have increased in size" would be better grammar and just as good sense.

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A LESSON FOR THE NATIONAL SERVICE DEPARTMENT.

Words under a picture in _The Daily Mail_:--

"Chiropodists are attending to the feet of America's new army, and dentists are paying attention to the teeth."

Whereas in the British Army it might so easily have been the other way round.

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OUR STYLISTS AGAIN.

From _The Tatler_ on the subject of the little Stork, which is the badge of Capt. Guynemer's squadron:--

"What emblem could, indeed, be more appropriate as well as beautiful as the bird which is the symbol of Alsace?"

* * * * *

"Wanted, Girls, age 18 to 22, for Jam Jars."--_Manchester Evening Chronicle_.

As a substitute for sugar, we presume; but wouldn't "Sweet Seventeen" be even more suitable?

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"In almost every part of England and Wales there are now some 200,000 women who are doing a real national work on the land."--_Mr. PROTHERO'S letter in "The Daily Telegraph."_

If there are 200,000 women in almost every part of England there can't be much chance for the men, particularly the single men.

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THE WAR DOG.

Never confuse the "War dog" with the "dog of War." The War dog is a direct product of the War, but you never yet met him collecting for a hospital, or succouring the wounded, or assisting the police, or hauling a mitrailleuse if he could help it. Yet the War dog worships the Army; it represents a square meal and a "cushy" bed. The new draft takes him for a mascot; but the old hand knows him better. A shameless blend of petty larceny, mendacity, fleas, gourmandism, dirt and unequalled plausibility.

You meet the War dog on some endless road. He will probably be wearing round his neck a piece of dirty card analogous to the eye patch and drooping Inverness cape of some mendicants nearer home--a "property" in fact, and put there by himself, the writer is convinced, although he has not yet actually caught the War dog dressing for the part. The War dog on the road has "spotted" you long before you have seen him, and he has marked you for his own. You become conscious of a piteous whine just behind you and, turning, see the War dog, his eyes filled with tears of entreaty, crawling towards you on his stomach. He advances inch by inch, and on being encouraged with comfortable words of invitation the parasite wriggles his lean body (it is trained to _look_ lean--actually it is well padded with stolen food from officers' kitchens) up to your feet, and, selecting a puddle in token of his deep humility, rolls upon his back and smiles tearfully up at you from between his grimy fore-paws. Then the game goes forward merrily as per schedule.

Of course you take him back to camp and give him your last piece of Blighty cake. You introduce your protégé--always crawling on his stomach--to the cook; swear to the dog's immaculate conduct; beg a trifle of straw from the transport, and in short see him comfortably settled for the night.

The War dog has you now well beneath his paws. He joins the Mess and listens with an ill-concealed grin as each in turn boasts of the rat-catching powers of his dog at home. Then the War dog retreats hurriedly as a mouse appears; and you, his victim, apologise for him and explain how he has been shaken by adversity and what a noble creature a few days of good food and kind treatment will make of him. The rest is simple. The War dog (with his court) invades your bed and home parcels, and brings you into disrepute with all and sundry--especially the Cook and Quarter. He is fought and soundly thrashed by the regimental mascot (half his size), and the battalion wit composes limericks about you and your pet.

Then suddenly your War dog disappears. You are just beginning to live him down--having moved into another area--when you espy him from the street, the centre of a noisy group in a not too reputable wine-shop. But the War dog never recognises you. He has finished with you--grown tired of you, in fact (he rarely "works" the same victim for more than three weeks). You and your battalion are to him as it were a bone picked clean; and you depart with a prayer that he may die a stray's death at the hands of the Military Police.

One month travelling snugly in a G.S. waggon (you never catch him marching like an honest mascot), the next "swinging the lead" in some warm dug-out--there are few moves on the board of the great War game that he does not know. He will patronise a score of regiments in three months; travel from one end of the Western Front to the other and back again, taking care never to attempt to renew an old acquaintance. Occasionally he makes the mistake of running across a mitrailleuse battery with its dog-teams needing reinforcements, or tries to billet himself on a military pigeon-loft and meets a violent death. But whatever fortune may bring him we can confidently assert that he is much too fly to chance his luck across the border and into the land where the sausage-machines guard the secret of perpetual motion.

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IN WILD WALES.

Dwarfing the town that to the hillside clings On terraced slopes, the castle, nobly planned And noble in its ruined greatness, flings Its double challenge to the sea and land.

Oh, if the ancient spirit of the place Could win free utterance in articulate tones, What tales to hearten and inspire and brace Would issue from these grey and lichened stones!

Once manned and held by paladin and peer, Now tenanted by jackdaws, bats and owls, Save when the casual tourist through its drear And grass-grown courts disconsolately prowls.

Once famous as the scene of Border fights, Now watching, in the greatest war of all, Old men, with their bilingual acolytes, Beating, outside its gates, a little ball;

While on the crumbling battlements on high, Where mail-clad men-at-arms kept watch and ward, Adventurous sheep amaze the curious eye Instead of grazing on the level sward.

But though such incongruities may jar The sense of fitness in a mind fastidious, Modernity has wholly failed to mar The face of Nature here, or make it hideous.

Inland the amphitheatre of hills Sweeps round with Snowdon as their central crest, And murmurs of innumerable rills Blend with the heaving of the ocean's breast.

Already Autumn's fiery finger laid On heath and marsh and woodland far and wide In all their gorgeous pageantry has arrayed The tranquil beauties of the countryside.

Here every prospect pleases, and the spot, Unspoilt, unvulgarised by man, remains, Thanks largely to a System which has not Accelerated or improved its trains.

Yet even here, amid untroubled ways, Far from the city's fevered, tainted breath, Yon distant plume of yellow smoke betrays The ceaseless labours of the mills of death.

* * * * *

"William Arthur Fletcher, ship's apprentice, of South Shields, was remanded for a week on a charge of being absent from his ship. His captain alleged that he had found Fletcher asleep on the bridge."--_Daily Dispatch_.

It must have been his mind that was absent.

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"At St. Peter's, Vere Street, where he is going to preach from the 30th of this month to the end of this year, the Rev. R.J. Campbell will speak from the pulpit of Frederick Denison Maurice, like himself a convert to the Church of England ... To hear him was an experience never forgotten."--_Guardian_.

And this although MAURICE rarely preached for more than one month on end.

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* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks_.)

I can't help thinking that _Gyp_, the central figure in Mr. JOHN GALSWORTHY'S new story, _Beyond_ (HEINEMANN), was unhappy in her encounters with the opposite sex. But if memory serves me this is an experience familiar to Mr. GALSWORTHY'S heroines. Men were always wanting to kiss _Gyp_, or to marry her, or both, and after a time kept going off and repeating the process with somebody else; so that one can't fairly be astonished if towards the end of the book her outlook had become rather cynical. The character who might have preserved her estimate of mankind in general, and the best and most sympathetically drawn figure in the book, is _Gyp's_ perfectly delightful old father, who throughout the conspicuous failure of her two unions, legitimate and other, retained his fine and chivalrous regard and unfailing care for a daughter who might well have been a thorn in the flesh of a conventional parent. But the relations of these two were never conventional. _Gyp_ had been herself a love-child, and the knowledge of this is shown very clearly in its influence upon their mutual attitude. As for her own affairs, these were, first--to her father's unbounded astonishment--marriage with a temperamental violinist, who ran rapidly down the scale from adoration of his own wife to intrigue with another's; second, clandestine relations with a man of her own race and breed, who loved her to idolatry, and within a few months was found embracing his cousin. Poor _Gyp_! I jest; but you will need no telling that for sincerity and beauty of writing here is a book that you cannot afford to miss. Sometimes I am a little uncertain what Mr. GALSWORTHY is driving at, but I never fail to admire his drive.

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Unless Mr. S.P.B. MAIS learns to curb his enthusiasms and to rid himself of certain prejudices he will be wantonly seeking trouble. _Rebellion_ (GRANT RICHARDS) is in some respects a more thoughtful and promising book than _Interlude_, but it is marred by what can only be called the same narrow point of view. With everybody and everything modern Mr. MAIS shows an ardent sympathy, but if he is ever to give a comprehensive picture of life he must contrive to be more patient with the old-fashioned. Here his strong personality obtrudes itself too often, and he is inclined to forget that he is a novelist and not a preacher. I could imagine him throwing off a fine comminatory sermon from the text, "Cursed be he who does not admire the genius of Mr. COMPTON MACKENZIE." This homily is drawn from me with reluctance, because in the main I am a strong believer in Mr. MAIS, and (with his connivance) have every intention of retaining that attitude. With all its faults _Rebellion_ remains gloriously distinct from the rubbish-heap of fiction by virtue of its intense sincerity and its frequent flashes of fine descriptive writing. The question of sex dominates it, and those of us who still think that such problems are merely sustenance for the prurient-minded may cast it impatiently aside. But others who like to watch a clever man feeling his way towards the light, and regard a novel as neither a bait nor a bauble, can be confidently advised to read it. They may be irritated, but they will be intrigued.

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On the cover of _One Woman's Hero_ (METHUEN) you will read that "This book has been designed to cheer and strengthen those for whom, from bereavement owing to the War, the days and nights are sometimes only a procession of sad and torturing visions." Which of course disarms criticism, other than what may be expressed in a question whether a book less exclusively preoccupied by the War might not more surely have attained this end. But again, of course, maybe it wouldn't. The tale (for all our pretendings) is not yet written that can actually bring oblivion to bereavement, so perhaps the next best thing is topical chatter of the bright and unsentimental kind with which SYBIL CAMPBELL LETHBRIDGE has filled her entertaining pages. Chatter is the only term for it, though it is quite good of its style; the form being a series of letters written to a friend by the young wife of a soldier at the front. Her neighbours, their households and dinners and affectations and courage, are what she writes about; especially do I commend her handling of the "Let us Forget and Forgive" tribe. To all such (and most of us know at least one) I should suggest the posting of a copy of _One Woman's Hero_, with the page turned down (an act permissible in so good a cause) at the report of the annihilation of one of these well-intentioned but infuriating philosophers. The combined logic and equity of this suggest that the Government might do worse than commandeer the services of Miss LETHBRIDGE as a dinner-table propagandist.

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I think BEATRICE GRIMSHAW tortures overmuch her tough bronzed Australian hero, who "could fight his weight in wild cats," and her beautiful slender heroine, "daughter of castles, descendant of crusaders." First the twain fall desperately in love, and _Edith_, the Catholic, discovers _Ben_ to be an innocent _divorcé_. Marriage impossible, they part. But it is apparently quite in order for her to marry, without loving, a cocoa king who drinks--anything but cocoa; which done, to add to the bitterness of the cup, _Ben's_ wife is reported dead. Whereafter the king in a drunken fit poisons himself, and the widow, fearing to be suspect, flies with her big _Ben_ to his secret _Nobody's Island_ (HURST AND BLACKETT), off the New Guinea coast, where they live comfortably off ambergris. Eventually tracked down by the dead king's brother, who allows himself to be persuaded of _Edith's_ innocence on what seems to me the most inadequate evidence, the lovers, after protracted mental agonies and physical dangers, are about to enjoy deserved peace when _Ben's_ wife turns up again, necessitating further separation; till finally _Edith_, with a handsome babe and the news that after all _Ben's_ first wife wasn't a wife at all, finds her way back to Nobody's Island. Now that does seem to be rather overdoing it. But I hasten to credit the writer with a very happy gift of description, which brings the Papuan forests and mountains (or something plausibly like them) vividly before the reader, while the characters, including a boy villain ingenuously bizarre, are amusing puppets capably manipulated.

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Mrs. BARNES-GRUNDY possesses a wonderful supply of sprightly humour. _Her Mad Month_ (HUTCHINSON) is funny without being flippant, and although the heroine is very naughty she is never naughty enough to shock her creator's unhyphened namesake. Perhaps _Charmian's_ exploits in escaping from a severe grandmother, and going unchaperoned to Harrogate (where a very pretty piece of philandering ensued), do not amount to much when seriously considered, but it is one of Mrs. BARNES-GRUNDY'S strong points that you cannot take her seriously. I am on her side all the time when she is giving me light comedy, but when she leaves that vein and bathes her heroine in tears I cannot conjure up any real sympathy. I never for a moment doubted that _Charmian's_ lover, though reported as having "died from wounds," would turn up again. I am afraid the War is responsible for a great deal of rather obvious fiction.

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Miss MARIE HARRISON has investigated the condition of Ireland, and in _Dawn in Ireland_ (MELROSE) she presents the results of her studies. The book is inspired by a great deal of the right kind of enthusiasm, and the advice given is so excellent as to arouse the fear that it will not be taken. Yet Miss HARRISON is justified of her endeavours. She shows how often the English governors of Ireland have failed, in spite of the best intentions, only because they applied their remedy too late and thus, to their own great surprise, wasted the generosity of which they were perhaps too conscious. According to Miss HARRISON the gombeenman is the curse of Ireland, the serpent whose presence, if only he can be reduced to being an absentee, warrants us in regarding Ireland as a possible Eden. Miss HARRISON will please to take the preceding sentence as proving my entire sympathy with Irish modes of thought and expression and, generally, with Ireland. Against the gombeener (who is a shop-keeper running his business on the long-credit system) she invokes a vision of the blessings of co-operation. One of her heroes is Sir HORACE PLUNKETT, and, indeed, the work of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, over which he has presided, has been an unmixed benefit to Ireland. I heartily endorse Miss HARRISON'S hope that "at no distant period all will be well with Ireland." Her book should certainly help towards this result.

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Captain VERE SHORTT fell at Loos in September of 1915, and left twelve chapters of a story, _The Rod of the Snake_ (LANE), which his sister has finished and very capably finished; helped by the recollection of many intimate conversations about the plot and its development. It tells how young _Charlie Shandross_, bidding his preposterous soldier uncle be hanged, shook the stale dust of Ballybar off his feet, served three years in the C.M.R., and so prepared himself for the deadly adventure of the rod of the snake, the image of the ape, the Haytian attaché and the sinister priestess of Voodoo rites--Paris its setting. I won't spoil your pleasure by giving the details away; I will only say it is all very splendidly incredible, but not unplausible, and the authors do take pains with their puzzles, as where the hero and his party find the secret spring of the panel in the vault by the blood tracks of their enemy, who has been thoughtfully wounded in the hand. A small point but significant; too many writers in this kind being given to whisking their favourites out of danger in the most arbitrary manner. A good railway book, of the sort you can confidently pass on to the soldiers' hospitals after reading it.

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