* * * * *

    “Bournemouth.—­Delicate or Chronic Lady received in
    charming house.”—­British Weekly.

In the new army a gentleman may be “temporary;” but once a lady always a lady.

* * * * *

The Hun as idealist.

  A guileless nation, very soft of heart,
    Keen to embrace the whole wide world as brothers,
  Anxious to do our reasonable part
    In reparation of the sins of others,
      We note with pained surprise
  How little we are loved by the Allies.

  What if the Fatherland was led astray
    From homely paths, the scene, of childlike gambols,
  Lured to pursue Ambition’s naughty way
    (And incidentally make earth a shambles),
      All through a wicked Kaiser—­
  Are they, for that blind fault, to brutalize her?

  Just when we hoped the past was clean forgot,
    They want us to restore their goods and greenery! 
  They want us to replace upon the spot
    The “theft” (oh, how unfair!) of that machinery;
      By which our honest labours
  Might have secured the markets of our neighbours!

  Bearing the cross for other people’s, crime,
    Eager to purge the wrong by true repentance,
  When to a purer air we fain would climb,
    How can we do it under such a sentence? 
      Is this the law of Love,
  Supposed to animate the Blessed Dove?

  Oh, not for mere material loss alone,
    Not for our trade, reduced to pulp, we whimper,
  But for our dashed illusions we make moan,
    Our spiritual aims grown limp and limper,
      Our glorious aspirations
  Touching a really noble League of Nations.

  So, like a phantom dawn, it fades to dark,
    This vision of a world made new and better;
  And he whose heavenly notes recalled the lark
    Soaring, in air without an earthly fetter—­
      Wilson is gone, the mystic,
  Whose views, like ours, were so idealistic!

  O.S.

* * * * *

Good-Bye to the auxiliary patrol.

I.—­The ship.

When it was announced that we were to be paid off and that the gulls and porpoises that help to make the Dogger Bank the really jolly place it is would know us no more, there was, I admit, a certain amount of subdued jubilation on board.  It is true that the Mate and the Second Engineer fox-trotted twice round the deck and into the galley, where they upset a ship’s tin of gravy; and the story that the Trimmer, his complexion liberally enriched with oil and coaldust, embraced the Lieutenant and excitedly hailed the Skipper by his privy pseudonym of “Plum-face,” cannot be lightly discredited; but at the same time I think each one of us felt a certain twinge of regret.  Life in the future apart from our trawler seemed impossible, almost absurd.  Pacificists must have known a similar feeling on Armistice day.