Page:Punch (Volume 147).pdf/370

326 

Oct. 8, 1914.

,—I have been far too busy to write before. In this "Clash of Nations," as James finely said in his last sermon, I am distracted to find suitable holiday amusements for the children. Fräulein should have returned from her holiday in Berlin six weeks ago and was prevented with all her boxes ready packed to come; but perhaps it's as well, as James speaks of the Germans in the strongest terms—quite rightly so, of course; but one would be sorry for the poor girl to feel ashamed of her relations.

Our only alien is poor old Miss Schmidt, who has taught music for thirty years. We all try to be lenient and nice to her at my work-parties, which are widely attended. James calls them a mixture of Dorcas and Bellona —ask Harry to explain. The boys are helping to make saddle-pads for the horses at the front. They try each pad on our old Dobbin and are wild for him to go on service at once; but James has just decided that a Vicar's pony's place is in the last line of the Reserves.

You asked me how long the war would continue. We have had quite a lot of talk with the Admiral and dear old General Ramrod about it; but James says, with the utmost respect for their characters, that these naval and military men are so hide-bound. In his opinion hostilities will be over in two months from now. He says: When the British Lion roars Foreign legions go indoors! You know his funny way. The boys are now shouting this all about the garden, and trying to roar like lions. I have the greatest difficulty in preventing them from going to fight other children out of sheer patriotism. The darlings do look so nice and smart. I could not resist buying them flags and tin swords and helmets like real soldiers in spite of the Moratorium, which I called by mistake crematorium, and James made delightful fun about it. He also said some clever thing about banks which I can't recall; it may come to me later.

Every one talks of nothing but the war. Even the errand-boys must have their say; I caught one of them setting up our nice loin chops in the dusty drive and knocking them down with pebbles for bombs; while the girl who fetched the laundry stayed for an hour in the kitchen teaching cook First Aid bandaging, and dinner was spoilt in consequence. However these are all the little discomforts of war and must be borne in a cheerful spirit.

Your affectionate Sister,

P.S.—Dear James's joke was about John Bull and bullion. Harry will understand and appreciate it.

 

used to be for the most part a bore, and, unless rich, it was well that they were disregarded. But the war has altered all that. The war has broUght relations, no matter how humble, into fashion.

Not all, but some. I have as a matter of fact myself one brother in the Fusiliers, in camp, and another who is a special constable and, three times has reported an airship by telephone; but these do not count. It is fathers, brothers, cousins, sons, uncles and nephews at the Front who count.

Anyone who can refer to a real relation at the Front is just now conversationally on velvet, while, if a letter from this relation can be produced and read, everyone else must give way. ,, , even, would be three-a-penny to-day as against one obscure individual who happened to have a brother in the trenches and a letter in his hand-writing.

But that is not all. There is reflected glory too. To know a person who has a relation at the Front is to be immeasurably promoted socially, and most of the conversations which one overhears in trains and elsewhere have some such opening as this: "A friend of my brother's has seen a Belgian..." "A cousin of my wife's who is a doctor in a field hospital says..." "I know a man who was talking with a wounded Tommy, and he..." "An undergraduate friend of my boy's who is just back from France..." Once stories begun in this way would empty a room; but not so now. Now they no longer devastate but fascinate. It does not matter what the stories are about, the fact remains that an opening gambit which thme months ago would stamp a man as a triple bore now holds everyone breathless. In short, relations at last have come to their own. Another achievement of !

For the most part they bear upon German atrocities, just as a little while ago they were the preliminaries to unmistakable evidence of the presence in this country of thousands of Russians travelling from Scotland to Southampton by underground passage and other mysterious ways. I myself believed in those Russians absolutely, and relinquished them with pain and sorrow; and all because they were attested to by other people's relations. This helps to show what a hold the relation is getting on us. In fact no story of the war is now possible without some kith and kin in it.

Personally I am much out in the cold. Those two brothers I told you of may serve to fill a gap now and then—a gap left by other more entertaining raconteurs—but they are not, as I said, any real good. Both are in England, and one will never leave it. But if things were different... If only that soldier brother had joined earlier and had written to me from Rheims, say, or Compiegne, how my stock would fly up! Or if that other one would even now fling away his truncheon, enlist in time to share the march to Berlin, and then sit down to tell me all about it, what a swell I should become! How dinner-parties would assemble to hear me!

As it is, I have to-day to do the best I can either with the tame home-keeping exploits of these two, or, by listening with excessive sympathy or by other parasitical endeavour, acquire a reversionary interest in someone else's relation's narrative. I have even, in order to cut some sort of a figure in a company where relations were being used with dashing success—I have even gone so far as to appropriate the gardener's boy's uncle, last heard of from Cambrai, as a personal and communicative friend, and claim an intimate association with his letter home.

And how splendid if all that could be changed!

"My brother," I could say boldly and with truth,—"my brother has sent me a few lines from Berlin, the substance of which you might care to hear." Of course they would be falling over each other to hear, but that is my artful way. "He camped out," I should go on, "in the Thiergarten. He says that to see the French waving their arms and cheering on the top of the Brandenburg Gate was one of the finest things possible to imagine. He had one bit of special luck: he was chosen to be one of the guard to protect the removal of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum pictures which are coming to London. He says that among these is the famous portrait of (No. 413A) which is among our little lot."

That would be worth living for—the triumph of that relation's letter! It cannot, I fear, be mine; but surely it will be somebody's... 