Overdressed fashionables pester wounded officers and men with their unreasonable visits and futile queries.  The enemies in our midst are not all aliens; there are not a few natives we should like to see interned.

The Kaiser has had his first War birthday and, as the Prussian Government has ordered that there shall be no public celebrations, this confirms the rumours that he now wishes he had never been born.

Germany, says the Cologne Gazette in an article on the food question, “has still at hand a very large supply of pigs”—­even after the enormous number she has exported to Belgium.  Germany, however, does not only export pigs; her trade in “canards” with neutrals grows and grows, chiefly with the United States, thanks to the untiring mendacity of Bernstorff and Wolff.  Compared with these efforts, the revelations of English governesses at German courts, which are now finding their way into print, make but a poor show.

As the British armies increase, the moustache of the British officer, one of the most astonishing products of these astonishing times, grows “small by degrees and beautifully less.”  Waxed ends, fashionable in a previous generation, are now only worn by policemen, taxi-drivers and labour leaders.  The Kaiser remains faithful to the Mephistophelean form.  But in proof of his desire to make the best of both worlds, nether and celestial, he continues to commandeer “Gott” on every occasion as his second in command.  Out-Heroding Herod as a murderer of innocents, he enters into a competition of piety with his grandfather.  For we should not forget that the first German Emperor’s messages to his wife in the Franco-Prussian War were once summed up by Mr. Punch: 

  Ten thousand French have gone below;
  Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.

February, 1915.

January ended with a knock for the Germans off the Dogger Bank, when the Bluecher was sunk by our Battle-Cruiser Squadron: 

  They say the Lion and the Tiger sweep
  Where once the Huns shelled babies from the deep,
  And Bluecher, that great cruiser—­12-inch guns
  Roar o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.

And now it is the turn of “Johnny Turk,” who has had his knock on the Suez Canal, and failed to solve the Riddle of the Sands under German guidance.  Having safely locked up his High Seas Fleet in the Kiel Canal, the Kaiser has ordered the U-boat blockade of England to begin by the torpedoing of neutral as well as enemy merchant ships.

You may know a man by the company he keeps, and the Kaiser’s friends are now the Jolly Roger and Sir Roger Casement.

Valentine’s Day has come and gone.  Here are some lines from a damp but undefeated lover in the trenches: 

  Though the glittering knight whose charger
    Bore him on his lady’s quest
  With an infinitely larger
    Share of warfare’s pomp was blest,
  Yet he offered love no higher,
    No more difficult to quench,
  Than the filthy occupier
    Of this unromantic trench.