October, 1915.

September ended with the Western front once more ablaze, with bitter fighting at Loos and a great French offensive in Champagne.  With October the focus of interest and anxiety shifts to the Balkans.  Austrian armies, stiffened with Germans, have again invaded Serbia and again occupied Belgrade.  The Allies have landed at Salonika, and Ferdinand of Bulgaria has declared war on Serbia.  Thus a new theatre of war has been opened, and though it is well to be rid of a treacherous neutral, the conflict enters on a fresh and formidable phase.  When Ferdinand went to Bulgaria he is said to have resolved that if ever there were to be any assassinations he would be on the side of the assassins.  He has been true to his word ever since the removal of Stamboloff: 

  Here stands the Moslem with his brutal sword
    Still red and reeking with Armenia’s slaughter;
  Here, fresh from Belgium’s wastes, the Christian Lord,
    His heart unsated by the wrong he wrought her;
  And you between them, on your brother’s track,
  Sworn, for a bribe, to stick him in the back.

France and England have declared their intention of rendering all possible help to Serbia in her new ordeal, but Greece, false to her treaty with Serbia, and dominated by a pro-German Court and Government, hampers us at every turn. “’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more.”  So Byron sang, and a Byron de nos jours adds a new stanza to his appeal: 

  Lo, a new curse—­the Teuton bane! 
    Again rings out the trumpet call;
  France, England, Russia, joined again,
    For freedom fight, for Greece, for all;
  And Greece—­shall she that call ignore? 
  Then is she living Greece no more!

Life in the trenches grows more strenuous as the output of high explosive increases, and the daily toll of our best and bravest makes grievous reading for the elders at home, “who linger here and droop beneath the heavy burden of our years,” though many of them cheerfully undertake the thankless fatigues of guarding the King’s highway as specials.  But letters from the front still show the same genius for making light of hardship and deadly peril, the same happy gift of extracting amusement from trivial incidents.  So those who spend their days and nights under heavy shell fire and heavy rain write to tell you that “tea is the dominating factor of war,” or that “the mushrooming and ratting in their latest quarters” are satisfactory.  And even the wounded, in comparing the hazards of London with those at the front, only indulge in mild irony at the expense of the “staunch dare-devil souls who stay at home.”

In Parliament Sir Edward Carson has explained the reasons of his resignation of office—­his difference from his colleagues in the difficulties arising in the Eastern theatre of war; and a resolution has been placed on the order-book proposing the appointment of a Committee of Inquiry on the Dardanelles campaign.  No abatement of the plague of questions is yet noticeable, but some slight excuse may be found for the “ragging” of the Censor.  This anonymous worthy, it appears, recently excised the words “and the Kings” from the well-known line in Mr. Kipling’s “Recessional”: