Nothing is too good for our fighting men. Let my subscription to that
axiom be complete; and yet----
Well, it is like this. A man who is only a year or so too old for
active service, but feels as fit and keen as a boy, has so many
opportunities for regretting his enforced civilism and absence from
the arena that it is hard when additional ones are thrust upon him.
He may do his best at home. He may guard gasworks, or organise funds,
or campaign as an enlister, or visit the hospitals; but all the time
he is conscious that being here is so different from being there. It
galls him day and night, and the only thing that can help him at all
is the society of lovely women, and now he has lost that!
I hate to grumble, and I have, I believe, shouldered my share of the
new taxes like a man, but I am not made of such stern stuff as to be
superior to all human aid, and in my own case the mortification of
non-combating, which now and then becomes depressingly acute, is to be
alleviated only in this way. Nice women must do their part.
But do they? No. They did at first, but no longer.
Let me tell you. The other evening I found myself one of the
complacent hosts of a party of merry chattering young women, who
seemed to be quite satisfied with our attention. All of us were just
beginning to be very jolly, and I had actually forgotten my hard
destiny of inactivity, when who should come into the room but an
officer on crutches, who happened to be an acquaintance of each of our
guests but was unknown both to me and my other just too elderly male
friends. In an instant we were alone, and alone we remained for
certainly half an hour, while every attention was being paid by our
guests to that other. When at last they tore themselves away and
returned, their conversation was wholly confined to their wounded
friend's adventures, and we need not have been there at all, except to
pay the bill.
Now it is no fun to me to deceive anyone but myself, and hence I shall
not go about with my arm in a sling and win sympathy and attention to
which I am not entitled; but I do appeal to all the young women to
have a little pity on some of us compulsory stay-at-homes. Nothing is
too good for our fighting men. I repeat it. But just a tiny spark of
animation might be retained in the feminine eye when it alights upon
an old friend who is debarred from taking arms. Just a spark,
otherwise we shall go into a melancholy decline.
* * * * *
Smart Work.
"Owner gone to the front, friend offers his Wolseley ... L165,
an extraordinary opportunity."--_Advt. in "Autocar."_
If we were not confident that we should be wrong in putting upon these
words the sinister interpretation which they invite, we shouldn't envy
the advertiser when the owner returns.
* * * * *