We ourselves always listen with pleasure to their talk.  It has at once a fruity and a fishy flavour.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Gentleman (In favour of national work for everyone).  “AND WHY SHOULDN’T PEOPLE BE DOING TO-DAY WHAT THEY NEVER DREAMED OF DOING BEFORE THE WAR?”

New Assistant (his first operation).  “EXACTLY, SIR.  ALL THE SAME, IF ANYBODY HAD TOLD ME TWO DAYS AGO THAT I SHOULD NOW BE CUTTING THE HAIR OF A COMPLETE STRANGER, I’D NEVER HAVE BELIEVED ’IM.”]

WARS OF THE PAST.

(As recorded in the Press of the period.)

VI.

From “The Athens Advertiser and Piraeus Post.”

MACEDONIA’S ARMY.

THE FAMOUS PHALANX.

 (By our Military Expert.)

The Macedonian Army has recently undergone an entire reconstruction at the hands of KING PHILIP.  It is now organised on a national and territorial basis and is divided into infantry and cavalry.  The cavalry predominates and is therefore the stronger arm.  The unit of cavalry is the squadron, of infantry the battalion. (It is of the utmost interest to note that there are two battalions in a regiment, each about fifteen hundred strong).

KING PHILIP, it will be remembered, received his military education in the school of EPAMINONDAS, who, as is well known, revolutionised the Higher Thought of every Higher Command by the discovery and application of a single tactical fact—­namely, that the chances of A being able to give B a stronger push than B can give him are in direct ratio to the numerical superiority of A over B.  It follows, then, that, faced with a sufficient superiority, B must retire, and the initiative then rests with the side that possesses it.

In pursuance of this tactical ideal EPAMINONDAS argued that the old method of winning battles, which was that A should exercise superior force against every point of B’s line (or body), required that A should be bigger than B, buskin for buskin and brisket for brisket.  But since it is sufficient, while “refusing” the rest of one’s own body (or line), to bring an overwhelming force to bear on the point of a person’s jaw, in order to discomfit him, so in a battle a numerically inferior A, by concentrating on a vital point of numerically superior B, can gain a local numerical superiority which will enable him to rout B utterly. (This is always supposing that B is not doing the same thing himself on the other wing, in which case each army would miss the other altogether—­a condition of things into which the military art does not care to follow them).