THE DAWN OF INTELLIGENCE IN BERLIN.
FIRST TEUTON. "AFTER ALL IT SEEMS THAT OUR EVER-VICTORIOUS ARMY WAS BEATEN IN THE FIELD. ARE WE DOWN-HEARTED?"
SECOND TEUTON. "JA!"
THE MUD LARKS.
Only a few months ago our William and his trusty troop swooped upon a couple of Bosch field batteries floundering in a soft patch on the far side of Tournai. William afflicted their gun teams with his little Hotchkiss gadget, then prepared to gallop them. He had unshipped his knife and was offering his sergeant long odds on scoring first "pink," when our two squadron trumpeters trotted out from a near-by coppice and solemnly puffed "Cease Fire"—for all the world as if it was the end of a field-day on the Plain and time to trot home to tea. William was furious.
"There y'are," he snorted. "Just because I happened to have a full troop out for once, all my horses fit, no wire or trenches in the way, the burst of the season ahead and the only chance I've had in four and a-half years of doing a really artistic bit of carving they must go and stop the ruddy War. Poo! ain't that the bally Army all over? Bah! I've done with it."
So he filled in the bare patches in every Demobilisation Form Z 15 he could lay pen to.
Taking the proud motto of the MOND dynasty—"Make yourself necessary"—for guide, he became something different every day in his quest after an "Essential Trade." He was in turn a one-man-business, a railway-porter, a coal-miner, a farmer, a NORTHCLIFFE leader-writer, a taxi-baron, a jazz-professor and a non-union barber. At one moment he was single, an orphan alone and unloved; at another he had a drunken wife, ten consumptive young children and several paralytic old parents to support. All to no avail; nobody would believe him.