“‘You know me, Al!’ He made a home-run.”
TELL THIS NOT IN BOSTON
An American boy had his first experience in the first line of trenches under fire, and an American woman met him.
“Well, boy,” asked the woman, “what was it like? Pretty awful experience, wasn’t it?”
“Awful?” grinned the Sammee. “Funniest thing you ever saw.”
“Funny?” echoed the woman, amazed. “Why, what in the world do you mean?”
“Those beans! Why——” and he went off into a gale of laughter. “Of course you don’t know. But cook had made an enormous pot of beans for the boys and, say, they did smell some good. But they were too hot and so cook put them on the edge of the trench to cool off. Just then the Germans let go some shells and one hit that pot square. And it didn’t do anything to those beans. Honestly, ma’am, it simply rained beans for an hour!”
THE MESSAGE WAS SOBER, ANYHOW
General Sir Henry Rawlinson, Sir Douglas Haig’s “right-hand man,” is rather fond of relating a story concerning a major who, sent to inspect an outlying fort, found the commander intoxicated. He immediately locked him up; but the bibulous one managed to escape, and, making his way to the nearest telegraph office, dispatched the following message to no less a personage than the colonial secretary: “Man here, named ——, questions my sobriety. Wire to avert bloodshed.”