She can weave a web of magic for the unsuspecting foe,
    She can scent the breath of Kultur leagues away,
  She can hear a U-boat thinking in Atlantic depths below
    And disintegrate it with a Martian ray;
      She can feel her way by night
      Through the minefield of the Bight;
  She has all the tricks of science, grave and gay.

  In the twinkle of a searchlight she can suffer a sea-change
    From a collier to a Shamrock under sail,
  From a Hyper-super-Dreadnought, old Leviathan at range,
  To a lightship or a whaler or a whale;
     With some canvas and a spar
     She can mock the morning star
  As a haystack or the flotsam of a gale.

  She’s the derelict you chartered north of Flores outward-bound,
  She’s the iceberg that you sighted coming back,
  She’s the salt-rimed Biscay trawler heeling home to Plymouth Sound,
  She’s the phantom-ship that crossed the moon-beams’ track;
     She’s the rock where none should be
     In the Adriatic Sea,
  She’s the wisp of fog that haunts the Skagerrack.

Recognition of services faithfully done is an endless task; but Mr. Punch is glad to print the valedictory tribute of one of the boys in blue to a V.A.D.—­a class that has come in for much undeserved criticism.

  While willy-nilly I must go
  A-hunting of the Hun,
  You’ll carry on—­which now I know
  (Although I’ve helped to rag you so)
  Means great work greatly done.

Among the minor events of the month has been the christening of a baby by the names of Grierson Plumer Haig French Smith-Dorrien, as its father served under these generals.  The idea is, no doubt, to prevent the child when older from asking:  “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?”

England, as we have already said, endures its triumphs with composure.  But our printers are not altogether immune from excitement.  An evening paper informs us that “the dwifficuplties of passing from rigid trench warfare to field warfare are gigantic and perhaps unsurmountable.”  And only our innate sense of comradeship deters us from naming the distinguished contemporary which recently published an article entitled:  “The Importance of Bray.”

October, 1918.

THE growing crescendo of success has reached its climax in this, the most wonderful month of our annus mirabilis. Every day brings tidings of a new victory.  St. Quentin, Cambrai, and Laon had all been recaptured in the first fortnight.  On the 17th Ostend, Lille, and Douai were regained, Bruges was reoccupied on the 19th, and by the 20th the Belgian Army under King Albert, reinforced by the French and Americans, and with the Second British Army under General Plumer on the right, had compelled the Germans to evacuate the whole coast of Flanders.  The Battle of Liberation, which began on the Marne in July, is now waged uninterruptedly from the Meuse to the sea.  Only in Lorraine has the advance of the American Army been held up by the difficulties of the terrain and the exceptionally stubborn resistance of the Germans.