Page:Mr. Punch's history of the Great War, Graves, 1919.djvu/156

 such a degree as actually to have turned the key on the Tenth Muse. Interviewers had no chance. He came into office, held it and left it without a single concession to Demos' love of personalia.

Germany has not yet changed her Chancellor, though he is being bitterly attacked for his "silly ideas of humanity"—and her rulers have certainly shown no change of heart. General von Bissing's retirement from Belgium is due to health, not repentance. The Kaiser still talks of his "conscience" and "courage" in freeing the world from the pressure which weighs upon all. He is still the same Kaiser and Constantine the same "Tino," who, as the Berliner Tageblatt bluntly remarks, "has as much right to be heard as a common criminal." Yet signs are not wanting of misgivings in the German people.

Mr. Wilson has launched a new phrase on the world—"Peace without Victory"; but War is not going to be ended by phrases, and the man who is doing more than anyone else to end it—the British infantryman—has no use for them:

The gunner rides on horseback, he lives in luxury, The sapper has his dug-out as cushy as can be, The flying man's a sportsman, but his home's a long way back, In painted tent or straw-spread barn or cosy little shack; Gunner and sapper and flying man (and each to his job say I) Have tickled the Hun with mine or gun or bombed him from on high, But the quiet work, and the dirty work, since ever the War began, Is the work that never shows at all, the work of the infantryman.

The guns can pound the villages and smash the trenches in, And the Hun is fain for home again when the T.M.B.s begin, And the Vickers gun is a useful one to sweep a parapet, But the real work is the work that's done with bomb and bayonet. Load him down from heel to crown with tools and grub and kit, He's always there where the fighting is—he's there unless he's hit; Over the mud and the blasted earth he goes where the living can; He's in at the death while he yet has breath, the British infantryman!