At first glance this cartoon would seem to imply that the people inside
the Savoy had little interest in the war, for the figures in evening
dress are well in the foreground; a count of heads, however, will show
six, and possibly seven men in uniform and only four in civilian attire,
and of the soldiers not one is dancing--they are lookers-on at these
strange beings who pursue the ordinary ways of life.
Of such beings, not many are left--certainly not this proportion of four
to six, or four to seven. Compulsion has thinned the ranks of the
shirkers down to an irreducible minimum, and a visit to the Savoy at any
time in the last six months of 1916 would show khaki entirely
preponderant, just as it is in the streets. These correctly dressed and
monocled young men have been put into the national machine, and moulded
into fighting material--their graves are thick in Flanders and along the
heights north of the Somme, and they have proved themselves equal and
superior to what had long been regarded as the finest fighting forces of
Europe.
It is in reality no far cry from the Somme fighting area to the light
and the music of the Savoy, and a man may dance one night and die under
a German bullet the next--many have already done so. Here the artist
shows the lighter side of British life to-day, but one has only to turn
to the companion cartoon to this, "Outside the Savoy," to see that he
realizes London as thoroughly in earnest about the war.