THE FLIGHT THAT FAILED
THE EMPEROR: "What! No babes, Sirrah?"
THE MURDERER: "Alas, Sire, none."
THE EMPEROR: "Well, then, no babes, no iron crosses."
(Exit murderer, discouraged.)
The number of Mr. Punch's correspondents on active service steadily grows. Some of them are at the Western front; others are still straining at the leash at home; another of the Punch brigade, with the very first battalion of Territorials to land in India, has begun to send his impressions of the shiny land; of friendly natives and unfriendly ants; of the disappointment of being relegated to clerical duties instead of going to the front; of the evaporation of visions of military glory in the routine of typing, telephoning and telegraphing; of leisurely Oriental methods. Being a soldier clerk in India is very different from being a civilian clerk in England. Patience, good Territorials in India, your time will come.
THE SHIRKERS' WAR NEWS
"There! What did I tell you? Northdown Lambs beaten--two to nothing."
At home, though the "knut" has been commandeered and nobly transmogrified, though women are increasingly occupied in war work and entering with devotion and self-sacrifice on their new duties as substitutes for men, we have not yet been wholly purged of levity and selfishness. Football news has not receded into its true perspective; shirkers are more pre-occupied with the defeat or victory of "Lambs" or "Wolves" in Lancashire than with the stubborn defence, the infinite discomfort and the heavy losses of their brothers in Flanders.
Overdressed fashionables pester wounded officers and men with their unreasonable visits and futile queries. The enemies in our midst are not all aliens; there are not a few natives we should like to see interned.
The Kaiser has had his first War birthday and, as the Prussian Government has ordered that there shall be no public celebrations, this confirms the rumours that he now wishes he had never been born.