General von Kluck "never got round on the right." Calais is Calais still, and the Kaiser, if he still wishes to give it a new name, may call it the "Never, Never Land." "General Janvier" is doing his worst, but our men are sticking it out through slush and slime. As for the Christmas truce and fraternisation, the British officer who ended a situation that was proving impossible by presenting a dingy Saxon with a copy of Punch in exchange for a packet of cigarettes, acted with a wise candour:
For there he found, our dingy friend,
Amid the trench's sobering slosh,
What must have left him, by the end,
A wiser, if a sadder, Boche,
Seeing himself, with chastened mien,
In that pellucid well of Truth serene.
There can be no "fraternising" with Fritz until he realises that he has been fooled by his War Lords; and his awakening is a long way off. Lord Kitchener has been charged with being "very economical in his information" vouchsafed to the Lords, but it is well to be rid of illusions. This has not been a month of great events. General Joffre is content with this ceaseless "nibbling." The Kaiser, nourished by the flattery of his tame professors, encourages the war on non-combatants.The Turks are beginning to show a gift for euphemism in disguising their reverses in the Caucasus, which shows that they have nothing to learn from their masters; Austria, badly mauled by the Serbians, addresses awful threats to Roumania; and the United States has issued a warning Note on neutral trading. But the American Eagle is not the Eagle that we are up against.
THE FLIGHT THAT FAILED
THE FLIGHT THAT FAILED
THE EMPEROR: "What! No babes, Sirrah?"
THE MURDERER: "Alas, Sire, none."
THE EMPEROR: "Well, then, no babes, no iron crosses."
(Exit murderer, discouraged.)
The number of Mr. Punch's correspondents on active service steadily grows. Some of them are at the Western front; others are still straining at the leash at home; another of the Punch brigade, with the very first battalion of Territorials to land in India, has begun to send his impressions of the shiny land; of friendly natives and unfriendly ants; of the disappointment of being relegated to clerical duties instead of going to the front; of the evaporation of visions of military glory in the routine of typing, telephoning and telegraphing; of leisurely Oriental methods. Being a soldier clerk in India is very different from being a civilian clerk in England. Patience, good Territorials in India, your time will come.
At home, though the "knut" has been commandeered and nobly transmogrified, though women are increasingly occupied in war work and entering with devotion and self-sacrifice on their new duties as substitutes for men, we have not yet been wholly purged of levity and selfishness. Football news has not receded into its true perspective; shirkers are more pre-occupied with the defeat or victory of "Lambs" or "Wolves" in Lancashire than with the stubborn defence, the infinite discomfort and the heavy losses of their brothers in Flanders.Overdressed fashionables pester wounded officers and men with their unreasonable visits and futile queries. The enemies in our midst are not all aliens; there are not a few natives we should like to see interned.
The Kaiser has had his first War birthday and, as the Prussian Government has ordered that there shall be no public celebrations, this confirms the rumours that he now wishes he had never been born.
Germany, says the Cologne Gazette in an article on the food question, "has still at hand a very large supply of pigs"--even after the enormous number she has exported to Belgium. Germany, however, does not only export pigs; her trade in "canards" with neutrals grows and grows, chiefly with the United States, thanks to the untiring mendacity of Bernstorff and Wolff. Compared with these efforts, the revelations of English governesses at German courts, which are now finding their way into print, make but a poor show.
As the British armies increase, the moustache of the British officer, one of the most astonishing products of these astonishing times, grows "small by degrees and beautifully less." Waxed ends, fashionable in a previous generation, are now only worn by policemen, taxi-drivers and labour leaders. The Kaiser remains faithful to the Mephistophelean form. But in proof of his desire to make the best of both worlds, nether and celestial, he continues to commandeer "Gott" on every occasion as his second in command. Out-Heroding Herod as a murderer of innocents, he enters into a competition of piety with his grandfather. For we should not forget that the first German Emperor's messages to his wife in the Franco-Prussian War were once summed up by Mr. Punch:
Ten thousand French have gone below;
Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.
