September ended with the Western front once more ablaze, with bitter fighting at Loos and a great French offensive in Champagne. With October the focus of interest and anxiety shifts to the Balkans.Austrian armies, stiffened with Germans, have again invaded Serbia and again occupied Belgrade. The Allies have landed at Salonika, and Ferdinand of Bulgaria has declared war on Serbia. Thus a new theatre of war has been opened, and though it is well to be rid of a treacherous neutral, the conflict enters on a fresh and formidable phase. When Ferdinand went to Bulgaria he is said to have resolved that if ever there were to be any assassinations he would be on the side of the assassins. He has been true to his word ever since the removal of Stamboloff:
Here stands the Moslem with his brutal sword
Still red and reeking with Armenia's slaughter;
Here, fresh from Belgium's wastes, the Christian Lord,
His heart unsated by the wrong he wrought her;
And you between them, on your brother's track,
Sworn, for a bribe, to stick him in the back.
France and England have declared their intention of rendering all possible help to Serbia in her new ordeal, but Greece, false to her treaty with Serbia, and dominated by a pro-German Court and Government, hampers us at every turn. "'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more." So Byron sang, and a Byron de nos jours adds a new stanza to his appeal:
Lo, a new curse--the Teuton bane!
Again rings out the trumpet call;
France, England, Russia, joined again,
For freedom fight, for Greece, for all;
And Greece--shall she that call ignore?
Then is she living Greece no more!
Life in the trenches grows more strenuous as the output of high explosive increases, and the daily toll of our best and bravest makes grievous reading for the elders at home, "who linger here and droop beneath the heavy burden of our years," though many of them cheerfully undertake the thankless fatigues of guarding the King's highway as specials. But letters from the front still show the same genius for making light of hardship and deadly peril, the same happy gift of extracting amusement from trivial incidents. So those who spend their days and nights under heavy shell fire and heavy rain write to tell you that "tea is the dominating factor of war," or that "the mushrooming and ratting in their latest quarters" are satisfactory. And even the wounded, in comparing the hazards of London with those at the front, only indulge in mild irony at the expense of the "staunch dare-devil souls who stay at home."
In Parliament Sir Edward Carson has explained the reasons of his resignation of office--his difference from his colleagues in the difficulties arising in the Eastern theatre of war; and a resolution has been placed on the order-book proposing the appointment of a Committee of Inquiry on the Dardanelles campaign. No abatement of the plague of questions is yet noticeable, but some slight excuse may be found for the "ragging" of the Censor. This anonymous worthy, it appears, recently excised the words "and the Kings" from the well-known line in Mr. Kipling's "Recessional":
The Captains and the Kings depart.
Apparently the Censor cannot admit any reference to the movements of royalty.
REALISATION
REALISATION
("When I went to Bulgaria I resolved that if there were to be any assassinations I would be on the side of the assassins." STATEMENT BY FERDINAND.)
When the Kaiser was at Windsor in 1891 he told the Eton College Volunteers he was glad to see so many of them taking an interest in the study of arms, and hoped that if ever they had to draw their swords in earnest they would use them to some purpose for their country. Now that there are three thousand Etonians at the front he is beginning to be sorry he spoke. The Kaiser, by his own confession, is sorry in another way. He has told a Socialist deputy, "with tears in his eyes," that he was sincerely sorry for France, which was "the greatest disappointment of his life." Even crocodiles sometimes speak the truth unwittingly. Meanwhile the Hamburg Fremdenblatt asserts that, "We Germans would gladly follow the Kaiser's lead through the very gates of hell, were it necessary." The qualification is surely superfluous, in the light of the murder of the heroic English hospital matron, Edith Cavell, at Brussels on October 12. Her life was one long act of mercy. She died with unshaken fortitude after the mockery of a trial on a charge of having assisted fugitive British and Belgian prisoners to escape. But her great offence was that she was English. The names of her chief assassins are General Baron von Biasing, the Governor of Brussels, General von Sauberschweig, the Military Governor, and the Baron von der Lancken, the Head of the Political Department. Many years will pass before the echoes of that volley fired at dawn in a Brussels prison yard will die away.
LANDLADY; "'Ere's the Zeppelins, sir!" LODGER: "Right-o! Put 'em down outside."
LANDLADY; "'Ere's the Zeppelins, sir!"
LODGER: "Right-o! Put 'em down outside."
A new phase has been reached in the Conscription controversy, and the burning question appears to be whether the necessary men are to be compelled to volunteer or persuaded to be compulsorily enrolled. One of our novelist military experts, who is not always lucky with figures, though he thoroughly enjoys them, is alleged to have discovered that there are no more men than can be raised by conscription, but that the same does not, of course, apply to the voluntary system.
The Daily Mail asks, "Have we a Foreign Office?" We understand that a search-party is going carefully through Carmelite House. We have certainly got a Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, so efficient in the discharge of his duties that he has made himself an accomplished landscape painter in three months.
A visitor to a remote East Anglian village in search of rest has found recreation in discussing with the inhabitants the Great War, of which he found some of them had heard. "Them there Zett'lins," said one old woman, "I almost shruk as I heerd the mucky varmints a-shovellin' on the coals--dare, dare! How my pore heart did beat!" And an onlooker, who had seen a bomb drop near a church, informed the visitor that it "fared to him like the body of the chach a-floatin' away--that it did and all! It made a clangin' like a covey of lorries with their innards broke loose." Another inhabitant said that he had two boys fighting. "One on 'em is in France, wherever that might be, and Jimmy's in that hare old Dardelles." He couldn't rightly say when the elder had gone out, "but it might be a yare ago come muck-spreadin'."
