John. "BUT WHY MUSTN'T WE HAVE NEW BREAD ANY MORE?"
Joan. "WHY, DON'T YOU SEE, SILLY? IF WE EAT YESTERDAY'S AND SAVE UP TO-DAY'S THERE'LL ALWAYS BE SOME FOR TO-MORROW. THEN THE GERMANS CAN'T STARVE US."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
( By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
In these days, when everybody has his reminiscences, there should still be a welcome for so genial a volume as A Soldier's Memories (JENKINS), into which Major-General Sir GEORGE YOUNGHUSBAND has gathered his "Recollections of People, Places and Things." The title truly indicates the character of the contents, which are exactly what you would expect from a plain blunt man, who loves his friends, and equally loves a good story about them, at his own or their expense, impartially. The anecdotes in the book are legion, and the actors in them range from troopers to generals, and beyond. KING EDWARD, their present Majesties, Sir DOUGLAS HAIG ("a nice-looking clean little boy in an Eton jacket and collar") all figure in the author's pictures of the past, which include also a highly characteristic study of WILLIAM THE FRIGHTFUL, congratulating the "citizens of Salisbury," represented by a handful of curious urchins, upon their "beautiful and ancient cathedral." (One can fancy the unspoken addition in the Imperial mind, "And what a target for Bertha!") Many of Sir GEORGE'S pages are devoted to stories of the Boer campaign, that old unhappy far-off thing that seems somehow, as one looks back to-day, further off than Waterloo. In fine, a book that all Service folk, and many besides them, will find a treasure-house of good stories, of exactly the kind that should be certain of their appeal now, when we are all, or like to think ourselves, soldiers in the greatest of England's wars, and inheritors of the traditions here shown in the making.
A short hour's reading and you will have laid down, with a sigh for its brevity, a little book that is a very model of artistry. It is by Mr. E.V. LUCAS, and Outposts of Mercy is its happy name. But I am not to seek reflected glory by the praising of a colleague; simply for the sake of the cause that he pleads I wish to commend this fascinating account of the author's visit, in the company of Lord MONSON, Chief Commissioner, to the stations of the British Red Cross on the Carso, at Gorizia and among the Carnic and Julian Alps. Resisting sternly the temptation to embroider his theme with the distractions of scene and circumstance (of course he had to tell us of that dinner at the mess of an Alpine regiment where he met the man who had discovered the "Venus of Cyrene"), he keeps as closely as may be to his main subject, but cannot escape from infusing it with his own sense of colour and romance and the unconscious appeal of his personality. One may envy him his rare experience, yet fully share his pride in the fearless devotion of the men and women of our race (one can imagine it of no other) in these perilous and lonely outposts of mercy. A little paper book, illustrated with little photographs, and costing just a shilling. The author and his publishers (METHUEN) are devoting the profits to the British Red Cross; so you who buy and read it—and I don't see how anybody can refuse—may extract a claim to virtue from an hour of pure delight.