On our share of the Western front there is still what is nominally described as a “lull.”  But, as a young Officer writes, “you must not imagine that life here is all honey.  Even here we do a bit for our eight-and-sixpence.”  Once upon a time billets were billets.  They now very often admit of being shelled with equal exactitude from due in front and due in rear, and water is laid on throughout.  “It is a fact well known to all our most widely circulated photographic dailies that the German gunners waste a power of ammunition.  The only criticism I have to make is that I wish they would waste it more carefully.  The way they go strewing the stuff about around us is such that they’re bound to hit someone or something before long.  Still, we have only two more days in these trenches, and they seldom give us more than ten thousand shells a day.”

[Illustration:  Verdun, February—­March, 1916]

Letters from second-lieutenants seldom go beyond a gentle reminder that their life is not an Elysium.  They offer a strange contrast to the activities of Parliamentary grousers and scapegoat hunters.  If the Germans were in occupation of the Black Country, if Oxford were being daily shelled as Rheims is, and if with a favouring breeze London could hear the dull rumble of the bombardment as Paris can, one wonders if Members would still be encumbering the Order-paper with the vexatious trivialities that now find place there, or emitting what a patriotic Labour Member picturesquely described as “the croakings and bleatings of the fatted lambs who have besmirched their country.” Per contra we welcome the optimism of Mr. Asquith in discussing new Votes of Credit, though he reminds us of Micawber calculating his indebtedness for the benefit of Traddles.  It will be remembered that when the famous IOU had been handed over, Copperfield remarked, “I am persuaded not only that this was quite the same to Mr. Micawber as paying the money, but that Traddles himself hardly knew the difference until he had had time to think about it.”  Then we have had the surprising but welcome experience of Mr. Tim Healy championing the Government against Sir John Simon’s attack on the Military Service Bill; and have listened to Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’s urgent plea in the Lords for unity of air control, a proposal which Lord Haldane declared could not be adopted without some “violent thinking.”  Most remarkable of all has been Mr. Churchill’s intervention in the debate on the Naval Estimates, his gloomy review of the situation—­Mr. Churchill is always a pessimist when out of office—­and the marvellous magnanimity of his suggestion that Lord Fisher should be reinstated at the Admiralty, on the ground that his former antagonist was the only possible First Sea Lord.  Mr. Balfour dealt so faithfully with these criticisms and suggestions that there seems to be no truth in the report that Mr. Churchill has been asked to join the Government as Minister of Admonitions.