Orderly Officer. 'What are you doing without your rifle, Sentry?'
Tommy. "Beg pardon, Sir, but I ain't the Sentry."
Orderly Officer. "Who are you, then, and where is the Sentry?"
Tommy. "Oh, 'e's inside out of the rain. I'm one of the prisoners."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Herr Hermann Fernau's Because I am a German (Constable) is a sort of postscript to the widely-outside-Germany-circulated J'accuse!, that vigorous indictment by an anonymous German of the Prussian clique as the criminal authors of the War. Herr Fernau summarises the argument of J'accuse! and if anyone cares to have at his finger-tips the essential case against the enemy he could not do better than absorb the six pages in which twenty-four questions put by the anonymous author to the directors of his unhappy country's destiny are most skilfully compressed. Four attempted German answers are shown by our author to have in common an amazing reluctance to deal with any single definite point at issue; and a most unjudicial appeal to popular hatred of the traitor critic. Of course it is a cheap line to welcome as a miracle of wisdom every German who takes a pro-Ally view. But I honestly detect no shadow of pro-Ally bias in this book, and it is certainly no tirade against Germany. What bias there is is that of the extreme republican against his autocratic government. "I have read," says Herr Fernau in effect, "this perfectly serious and definite indictment lucidly drawn in legal form. I hope as a German (not afraid to sign my name) there is an answer. But whereas the Entente Powers have supported their official case by documentary evidence we are asked to accept mere asseveration in the case of Germany. That is the less allowable as the obvious (though not necessarily the true) reading of the facts is against her. Silence and vigorous suppression of the indictment look rather like signs of guilt." Yes, emphatically a book for members of the Independent Labour Party.