  By Beau Brummel. The news that the price of lounge suits will have risen to twenty-four pounds by the autumn has created something of a sartorial panic in the City and the West End. Famous old wardrobes are being broken up on all sides by owners anxious to acquire fresh clothing before it is too late, whilst the small properties thus created find eager tenants amongst those who cannot afford a new outfit at all. Many tailors who have built new suits are beginning to dispose of them on three or five year repairing leases, and possession of these may sometimes be secured from the present occupiers on payment of a substantial premium. Gentlemen possessing both town and country sets of suitings are in many cases letting the latter in order to come up to London for the season, whilst others are resorting to various economical artifices to meet the crisis. Plus four golf knickers, let down, make admirable wedding trousers for a short man, and many are the old college blazers dyed black and doing duty as natty pea-jackets. In the City, of course, fustian and corduroys are almost the only wear, and there is much divergence of opinion on the Stock Exchange as to the best knot for spotted red neckerchiefs and the proper way of tying the difficult little bow beneath the knees. In Parliament, where of course the old costly fashions have long been out of vogue, the change is equally noticeable. Lord Robert Cecil, for instance, habitually wears the white canvas suit in which Mr. Augustus John painted him; Lord Birkenhead mounts the Woolsack in an old cassock, which, as he points out, not only allows a very scanty attire underneath it, but gives him particular confidence in elucidating St. Matthew; while the Prime Minister himself set off for San Remo in a simple set of striped sackcloth dittos. Many Members are having their old pre-war morning coats turned; Mr. Winston Churchill in machine-gun overalls, Mr. Mallaby-Deeley self-dressed, Sir Edward Carson in a simple union suit, are conspicuous figures, and Mr. Horatio Bottomley by a whimsical yet thrifty fancy often attends the House in the humble attire of the Weaver in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Even in the Welsh collieries it is becoming the habit to go down the pits in rough home-spun, and reserving the top hat, morning coat and check trousers for striking in. "DENIKIN TIRED.
The gallant General is not the only one who is worn out with this hopeless task.
Was this the last hope of restoring calm to the "troubled waters"?
The House of Commons seems to have been confused with Izaak Walton Heath. "LADIES' GOLF AT RANELAGH.
But it is hoped that this method of thinning out the competitors will not be generally resorted to. "MURAL TEACHING.
We gather that in our contemporary's opinion it is high time that our Universities recognised "the writing on the wall." A VANISHED SPECIES.The great auk is but a memory; the bittern booms more rarely in our eastern marshes; and now they tell me Brigadiers are extinct. Handsomest and liveliest of our indigenous fauna, the bright beady eye, the flirt of the trench coat-tail through the undergrowth, the glint of red betwixt the boughs, the sudden piercing pipe—how well I knew them, how often I have lain hidden in thickets and behind hedgerows to study them more closely. How inquisitive the creature was, yet how seldom would it feed from the hand. And now, it seems, they are gone. Vainly I rack my brains to envisage the manner of their passing. Is there to be nothing left but silence and a shadow or a specimen in a dusty case of glass preserved in creosol and stuffed with lime? Or did not the Brigadiers rather, when they felt their last hour was upon them, retire like the elephants of the jungle to some distant spot and shuffle off the mortal coil in the midst of Salisbury Plain or (for so I still picture it despite the ravages of a rude commercialism) the vast solitude of Slough? Or it may be that they underwent some classic metamorphosis, translated to a rainless paradise, where they dreamed of battalions for ever inspected and the general salute eternally blown.
Anyhow, I cannot believe that ex-Brigadiers die. They only fade away. Fade away, I think, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, leaving at the last not a grin but a scowl behind them. "Brigadiers will fade away," I imagine, ran the instruction from the Army Council, "passing the vanishing point in the following order:—
But oh, how they will be missed, with their insatiable hunger for replies! I remember one in particular, very fierce and black-moustached, who used to pop up suddenly from behind a Loamshire hedge with an enormous note-book in his hand and say to unhappy company commanders, "The situation is so-and-so and so-and-so; now let me hear you give your orders." And the Company-Commander, who would have liked to read through Infantry Training once or twice and then hold a sort of inter-allied conference with his Platoon-Commander, putting the Company Sergeant-Major in the chair, felt that after frightfulness of this kind mere actual war would probably be child's-play. And yet they tell me he was a pleasant enough fellow in the Mess, this Brigadier, and liked good cooking. Now I come to think of it, he faded away before the War came to an end. He faded away into a Major-General. How different from this sort was the type that could always be placated by a glittering bayonet charge or a thoroughly smart salute! I remember one of this kind who came charging across the landscape, his Staff Captain at his heels, to a point where he saw a friend of mine apparently lost in meditation and sloth. Unfortunately the great man's horse betrayed him as he tried to jump a low hedge, and, when he had clambered up again and arrived in a rather tumbled condition to ask indignantly what had happened to the scouts, "They have established a number of hidden observation posts," my friend replied, keeping his presence of mind, "and are making an exact report of everything that transpires on the enemy's front," and he waved his arm towards the scene of the catastrophe. It was not thought necessary to examine their notes. In France Brigadiers were mainly divided into the sort that came round the front line themselves, and the sort that sent the Brigade-major or somebody else who had broken out into a frontal inflammation to do it for them. It is difficult to say which genus was the more alarming. The first was apt to exhibit its contempt for danger by strolling about in perilous places for five minutes and leaving them to be shelled in consequence for a week. The second sort was apt to issue orders depending for fulfilment on a faulty map reference or a landmark which had been carelessly removed by an H.E. shell. One of the most intransigeant of this kind whom I remember could always, however, be softened by souvenirs; a cast-off Uhlan's lance or the rifle of a Bosch sniper went far to console him for the barrenness of a patrol report. I feel sure he must have faded at Slough. But it was in battle that their wild appetite for information was most amazingly displayed. At moments when nobody knew where anybody else was or whether the ground underneath him was likely to remain in that sector more than a few moments or be detached and transferred to another, they would send by telephone or by a runner wild messages for an exact rÉsumÉ of the situation. It was at such times, I think, that some of those eminent war correspondents recently knighted would have done yeoman service in the front line. I can imagine them telephoning somewhat after this manner, in answer to the querulous voice:—
Yes, I think the Brigadiers would have liked that. But, alas, it could not be. And now they have gone, with their passion for questions, never to return, or never till the next A.C.I. cancels the last. "And now no sacred staff shall break to blossom, No choral salutation lure to light," as Swinburne put it; or "All the birds of the air fell a-sighin' and a-sobbin' When they heard of the death of poor Cock Robin," as No. 1 platoon of A Company used to sing. Ah, well. Evoe. |
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