AN UNDER-RATED MONSTER
Britannia: "That's a nasty-looking object, Mr. Boatman!"
Lord Tw-dm-th: "Bless your 'eart, mum, 'e won't 'urt you. I've been here, man an' boy, for the last six months, an' we don't take no account o' them things!"
Punch was more preoccupied with Lord Haldane's new army scheme, and when the War Minister, in introducing it, declared that the country would not be "dragooned into conscription," interpreted his statement "in other and less conventional terms" as indicating a conviction that "it is the inalienable right of the free-born British citizen to decline to lift a finger in his country's defence." Lord Haldane's proposals for retrenchment are symbolized in his efforts to make big toy soldiers fit his box, instead of making the box fit the soldiers. Wasters and loafers who had cheered "Bobs" on his return from South Africa are shown expressing indignation at his wanting to enforce universal military service. Punch's reluctant admission of our national lethargy finds vent in a dialogue emphasizing the predominance of the Panem et Circenses spirit—devotion to the Big Loaf and spectacular games—coupled with a loss of our supremacy in games. The pageant mania became acute in 1907, when Punch satirically asks, "Can you cite any other country where it is impossible to walk out of doors without colliding with an historical pageant?"
Lord Haldane's visit to Germany in 1906 is burlesqued in a diary professing to reveal his paramount interest in German philosophy and literature; and a picture, in which he appears in a Pickelhaube, expresses the misgivings of two British soldiers who had overheard him "talking to himself in German—something horrible." This attitude of critical distrust is maintained throughout the next four years. In March, 1908, the new gun designed for the Territorial Force prompts a dialogue between the War Minister and Field-Marshal Punch:—
Mr. Haldane: "In the event of invasion, I shall depend upon my brave Territorial force to manipulate this magnificent and complicated weapon."
F.-M. Punch: "Going to give them any training?"
Mr. H.: "Oh, perhaps a fortnight or so a year."
F.-M. Punch: "Ah! Then they'll need to be pretty brave, won't they?"
Further satire is expended in August of the same year on "A Skeleton Army; or, The Charge of the Very Light Brigade":—
Haldane (at Cavalry Manoeuvres): "You see those three men? Well, they're pretending to be one hundred. Isn't that imaginative?"
Mr. Punch: "Realistic, you mean. That's about what it will come to with us in real warfare."
