In the earlier stages of the War we looked on the moon as our friend.  Now that inconstant orb has become our enemy, and the only German opera that we look forward to seeing is Die Gothadaemmerung.  A circular has been issued by the Feline Defence League appealing to owners of cats to bring them inside the house during air-raids.  When they are left on the roof it would seem that their agility causes them to be mistaken for aerial torpedoes.  We note that the practice of giving air-raid warnings by notice published in the following morning’s papers has been abandoned only after the most exhaustive tests.  The advocates of “darkness and composure” have not been very happy in their arguments, but they are at least preferable to the members of Parliament deservedly trounced by Mr. Bonar Law, who declared that if their craven squealings were typical he should despair of victory.  Meanwhile, we have to congratulate our gallant French allies on their splendid bag of Zepps.  But the space which our Press allots to air raids moves Mr. Punch to wonder and scorn.  Our casualties from that source are never one-tenth so heavy as those in France on days when G.H.Q. reports “everything quiet on the Western front.”  Still worse is the temper of some of our society weeklies, which have set their faces like flint against any serious reference to the War, and go imperturbably along the old ante-bellum lines, “snapping” smart people at the races or in the Row, or reproducing the devastating beauty of a revue chorus, and this at a time when every day brings the tidings of irreparable loss to hundreds of families.

* * * * *

MISSING

  “He was last seen going over the parapet into the German trenches.”

  What did you find after war’s fierce alarms,
    When the kind earth gave you a resting-place,
  And comforting night gathered you in her arms,
    With light dew falling on your upturned face?

  Did your heart beat, remembering what had been? 
    Did you still hear around you, as you lay,
  The wings of airmen sweeping by unseen,
    The thunder of the guns at close of day?

  All nature stoops to guard your lonely bed;
    Sunshine and rain fall with their calming breath;
  You need no pall, so young and newly dead,
    Where the Lost Legion triumphs over death.

  When with the morrow’s dawn the bugle blew,
    For the first time it summoned you in vain,
  The Last Post does not sound for such as you,
    But God’s Reveille wakens you again.