A young American artist who has just returned from a six months’ job of driving a British ambulance on the war front in Belgium brings this back straight from the trenches:  “One cold morning a sign was pushed up above the German trench facing ours, only about fifty yards away, which bore in large letters the words:  ‘Got mit Uns!’ One of our cockney lads, more of a patriot than a linguist, looked at this for a moment and then lampblacked a big sign of his own, which he raised on a stick.  It read:  ‘We Got Mittuns, Too!’”

IMPERSONAL

A pretty girl at an evening party was bantering a genial bachelor on his reasons for remaining single.

“No-oo.  I never was exactly disappointed in love,” he said.  “I was what you might call discouraged.  You see, when I was very young I became very much enamored of a young lady of my acquaintance.  I was mortally afraid to tell her of my feeling, but at length I screwed up my courage to the proposing point.  I said, ‘Let’s get married,’ And she said, ’Why, who’d have us?’”

AND HE SUCCEEDED

The military strategist is born not made.

For example: 

Two youngsters, one the possessor of a permit, were fishing on a certain estate when a gamekeeper suddenly darted from a thicket.  The lad with the permit uttered a cry of fright, dropped his rod, and ran off at top speed.  The gamekeeper was led a swift chase.  Then, worn out, the boy halted.  The man seized him by the arm and said between pants:  “Have you a permit to fish on this estate?”

“Yes, to be sure,” said the boy quietly.

“You have?  Then show it to me.”

The boy drew the permit from his pocket.  The man examined it and frowned in perplexity and anger.

“Why did you run when you had this permit?” he asked.

“To let the other boy get away,” was the reply.  “He didn’t have any.”

NO CHANGE IN SHYLOCK

An old woman who lived in the country recently visited some friends in the city.  During her stay she was taken to see “The Merchant of Venice,” a play she had witnessed more than thirty years before, and which she had always had a strong desire to see again.  Calling next day, a friend asked her how the previous night’s performance compared with that of thirty years ago.

“Well,” she replied, “Venice seems to have smartened up a bit, but that Shylock is the same mean, grasping creature that he used to be.”

ENOUGH

After all, only a feminine mind can be truly broadminded and make a correct deduction of a whole from a knowledge of a part.  Said a certain lady in a shop: 

“I want a pair of pants for my sick husband.”

“What size?” asked the clerk.

“I don’t know, but he wears a 14-1/2 collar.”