The tide of “frightfulness” rolls strong on land as on sea.  The second battle of Ypres has begun and the enemy has resorted to the use of a new weapon—­poison gas.  He had already poisoned wells in South West Africa, but this is an uglier outcome of the harnessing of science to the Powers of Darkness.  Italy grows restive in spite of the blandishments of Prince Buelow, and as the month closes we hear of the landing of the Allies in Gallipoli, just two months after the unsupported naval attempt to force the Dardanelles.  British and Australian and New Zealand troops have achieved the impossible by incredible valour in face of murderous fire, and a foothold has been won at tremendous cost of heroic lives.  Letters from the Western front continue cheerful, but it does not need much reading between the lines to realise the odds with which our officers and men have to contend, the endless discomfort and unending din.  They are masters of a gallant art of metaphor which belittles the most appalling horrors of trench warfare; masters, too, of the art of extracting humorous relief from the most trivial incidents.

On the home front we have to contend with a dangerous ally of the enemy in Drink, and with the self-advertising politicians who do their bit by asking unnecessary questions.  Sometimes, but rarely, they succeed in eliciting valuable information, as in Mr. Lloyd George’s statement on the situation at the front.  We have now six times as many men in the field as formed the original Expeditionary Force, and in the few days fighting round Neuve Chapelle almost as much ammunition was expended by our guns as in the whole of the two and three-quarter years of the Boer War.

[Illustration:  THE HAUNTED SHIP

GHOST OF THE OLD PILOT:  “I wonder if he would drop me now!”]

The Kaiser has been presented with another grandson, but it has not been broken to the poor little fellow who he is.  It is also reported that the Kaiser has bestowed an Iron Cross on a learned pig—­one of a very numerous class.

May, 1915.

We often think that we must have got to the end of German “frightfulness,” only to have our illusions promptly shattered by some fresh and amazing explosion of calculated ferocity.  Last month it was poison gas; now it is the sinking of the Lusitania.  Yet Mr. Punch had read the omens some seven and a half years ago, when the records established by that liner had created a jealousy in Germany which the Kaiser and his agents have now appeased, but at what a cost!  The House of Commons is an odd place, unique in its characteristics.  Looking round the benches when it reassembled on May 10th, and noting the tone and purport of the inquiries addressed to the First Lord, one might well suppose that nothing remarkable had happened since Parliament adjourned.  The questions were numerous but all practical, and as unemotional as if they referred to outrages by a newly-discovered race of fiends in human shape peopling Mars or Saturn.  The First Lord, equally undemonstrative, announced that the Board of Trade have ordered an inquiry into the circumstances attending the disaster.  Pending the result, it would be premature to discuss the matter.  Here we have the sublimation of officialism and national phlegm.  Of the 1,200 victims who went down in this unarmed passenger ship about 200 were Americans.  What will America say or do?