Page:Mr. Punch's history of the Great War, Graves, 1919.djvu/114

 May, 1916.

ERDUN still holds out: that is the best news of the month. The French with inexorable logic continue to exact the highest price for the smallest gain of ground. If the Germans are ready to give 100,000 men for a hill or part of a hill they may have it. If they will give a million men they may perhaps have Verdun itself. But so far their Pyrrhic victories have stopped short of this limit, and Verdun, like Ypres, battered, ruined and evacuated by civilians, remains a symbol of Allied tenacity and the will to resist.

The months in war-time sometimes belie their traditions, but it is fitting that in May we should have enlisted a new Ally—the Sun. The Daylight Saving Bill became Law on May 17. Here is a true economy, and our only regret is that Mr. Willett, the chief promoter of a scheme complacently discussed during his lifetime as ingenious but impracticable, should not have lived to witness its swift and unmurmuring acceptance under stress of war.

The official communiqués from the Irish Front in the earlier stages of the Dublin rebellion did not long maintain their roseate complexion. Even before the end of April a Secret Session—the second in a week—was held to discuss the Irish situation. By a strange coincidence this Secret Session immediately followed the grant by the Commons of a Return relating to Irish Lunacy accounts. From the meagre official summary we gather that the absence of reporters has at least the negative advantage of shortening speeches. In a very few days, however, the Prime Minister discarded reticence, admitting the gravity of the situation, the prevalence of street fighting, the spread of the insurrection in the West, the appointment of Sir John Maxwell to the supreme command, and the placing of the Irish Government under his orders. The inevitable sequel—the execution of the responsible insurrectionist leaders—has led to vehement protests from Messrs. Dillon and O'Brien against militarist brutality. The House of Commons is a strange place. When Mr. Birrell rose on May 3 to give an account of his nine years' stewardship, the Unionists, and not the Unionists alone, were thinking of a lamp-post in Whitehall. When he had