WAR'S SURPRISES.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF "TAY PAY."
[The Daily Chronicle alludes to a recent article by Mr. T.P. O'CONNOR, M.P., as "a frigid survey of the situation.">[
The War has done many astonishing things;
It has doubled the traffic in trinkets and rings;
It has reconciled us to margarine
And made many fat men healthily lean.
It has answered the critics of Public Schools
And proved the redemption of family fools.
It has turned golf links to potato patches
And made us less lavish in using matches.
It has latterly paralysed the jaw
Of the hitherto insuppressible SHAW.
It has made old Tories acclaim LLOYD GEORGE,
Whose very name once stuck in their gorge.
It has turned a number of novelists
Into amateur armchair strategists.
It has raised the lowly and humbled the wise
And forced us in dozens of ways to revise
The hasty opinions we formed of our neighbours
In view of their lives and deaths and labours.
It has cured many freaks of their futile hobbies,
It has made us acquainted with female bobbies.
It has very largely emptied the ranks
Of the valetudinarian cranks,
By turning their minds to larger questions
Than their own insides or their poor digestions.
It has changed a First Lord into a Colonel,
Then into a scribe on a Sunday-journal,
With the possible hope, when scribbling palls,
Of doing his hit at the Music Halls.
It has proved the means of BIRRELL'S confounding
And given Lord WIMBORNE a chance of re-bounding.
But—quite the most wonderful thing of all
The things that astonish, amaze or appal—
As though a jelly turned suddenly rigid,
It has made "TAY PAY" grow suddenly frigid!
When rivers flow backwards to their founts
And tailors refuse to send in accounts;
When some benevolent millionaire
Makes me his sole and untrammelled heir;
When President WILSON finds no more
Obscurity in "the roots of the War";
When Mr. PONSONBY stops belittling
His country and WELLS abandons Britling:
When the Ethiopian changes his hue
To a vivid pink or a Reckitty blue—
In fine, when the Earth has lost its solidity,
Then I shall believe in "TAY PAY'S" frigidity.
Duration of the War.
"If the bid does not come early in 19717 the evidences of Germany's clamorous needs are strangely false."—Evening Paper.
Are we downhearted? No!
Extract from Army Orders in the Field:—
"When Sections 3 and 4 have opened rapid fire, and the bullets have had time to reach the enemy, but not before, Sections 1 and 2 move up into line with No. 3 and 4."
Aren't the Staff wonderful? They think of everything.
SNOWING HIM UNDER.
Possible Purchaser. "WHAT SORT OF DOG IS HE?"
Dog-Fancier. "'IM, LIDY? 'E'S A LITTLE PEDIGREE DAWG, 'E IS. AN' THIS IS 'IS MOTHER ON THE LEAD—QUITE ANOTHER TYPE O' DAWG, BUT ALSO A PEDIGREE."