I have interviewed the MULLAH, KRUGER, MENELIK, ABDULLAH,
    LOBENGULA, SITTING BULL and Clan-na-Gael;
  When I think of where I’ve been, what I’ve done and what I’ve seen,
    I’m surprised that I’m alive to tell the tale.

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[Illustration:  Standing Lady.  “MY HUSBAND WAS MADE A COLONEL JUST BEFORE THE ARMISTICE.”

Seated ditto.  “MY HUSBAND WOULD HAVE BEEN A GENERAL IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR THE WAR.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(BY MR. PUNCH’S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS).

Battle-books have already come to wear (even in so short a time) a strangely archaic aspect.  But Through the Hindenburg Line (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is, as its name tells you, nearer to date than most.  The writer, Mr. F.A.  MCKENZIE, was a Canadian war correspondent whom the Canadian Staff, believing (as he himself says) “that the right place for a war correspondent is where he can see what he is supposed to describe,” allowed to live among the troops in the front line.  As a result of this unusual privilege, his pictures of the great fights in the last stages of the War have the reality of personal experience.  The actual smashing of the Line, for example, is an epic of heroism and achievement still hardly realised by people at home, who cling to an idea that the final victories were gained over an enemy enfeebled and at disadvantage.  There are other chapters in the record that may perhaps hardly be welcomed at this moment by those amiable sentimentalists who would have us treat the enemy as a Bosch and a brother.  The hospital raid at Etaples is one of them; when, even after the light of the burning huts had made ignorance impossible, the gentle Hun, swooping low, swept with machine-gun fire the nurses and doctors who were attempting to remove the wounded.  That, I think, is a memory that will linger.  Another picture, queerly disproportionate in the anger it excites, is that of the fruit garden in a great country house, with its wealth of famous old peach and pear trees still in place along the walls, but every one methodically sawn through.  By comparison a trifling crime, but somehow I may forget other things more easily.  One would welcome the revised judgment of Dr. SOLF upon this particular expression of the German spirit.

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To those who have been persuaded by writers like Mr. H.G.  WELLS that the horse has not and ought not to have any part in modern warfare, Captain SIDNEY GALTREY’S The Horse and the War ("COUNTRY LIFE”) will come as a revelation.  Mr. WELLS has said that the sight of a soldier wearing spurs makes him sick, or words to that effect; yet so neglectful were our military authorities of Mr. WELLS’S opinions and teaching that they went on steadily adding horses, many of them cavalry horses, to the Army.  We began the War with twenty-five thousand horses,