THERE is not much laughter in this war, but when Raemaekers chooses he can recall to us for a little while the hearty, lung-filling delight of other days. And here we have it. A Kaiser so prayerfully, passionately ridiculous, a Tirpitz so stupendously, monumentally coy, and a cause for rejoicing so very slender, must tickle even a hyphenated sense of humor. Since the Battle of Jutland, of course, the joke is better still. But even before that the German Navy was the one item in the German array which could legitimately be found amusing, rather than painful.

Did not the Germans, bottled up in Kiel, announce that they were roving the seas looking for the British Navy, which at the same time, they said, was cowering in its East Coast harbors? And did not our official report of the Battle of the Bight begin with that sublimely unselfconscious phrase, “Starting from a point near Heligoland, a squadron of our fleet,” etc., etc.? Look at Heligoland on the map, for every time one looks at it it is really farther from England and nearer Germany than one had remembered; farther from our East Coast havens, and nearer to that corked bottle of German fizz, the Kiel Canal. Those first six words are a naval victory in themselves.

So we can enjoy with special zest the idea of the Kaiser, bold and noble baron, violating the modesty of village-maiden Tirpie with his ardent embraces, because she has played Una so beautifully that even the lion did not know she was there!

H. PEARL ADAM.