Page:Mr. Punch's history of the Great War, Graves, 1919.djvu/280

 The husbandman and his new help have undergone mutual transformation. And our cadet battalions are making themselves very much at home at Oxford and Cambridge.



The Navy still remains the silent Service, but, as the need for reticence is being relaxed by the triumph of our arms, we are beginning to learn something, though unofficially as yet, of that "plaything of the Navy and nightmare of the Huns"—the Q-boat:

She can weave a web of magic for the unsuspecting foe,
 * She can scent the breath of Kultur leagues away,

She can hear a U-boat thinking in Atlantic depths below
 * And disintegrate it with a Martian ray;
 * She can feel her way by night
 * Through the minefield of the Bight;
 * She has all the tricks of science, grave and gay.

In the twinkle of a searchlight she can suffer a sea-change
 * From a collier to a Shamrock under sail,