Page:The War and the Future (Masefield, 1918).djvu/98

86 don't you?" The man looked at the General and sized him up, and said, "Yes, General. That's just why I was doing it, sir. You know, sir, I'm a family man, sir. I daresay you are yourself, sir. And I was thinking, in a little while the little children will be coming back to these old battlefields. They won't know what these cruel bombs are, sir, they'll go playing with them, poor little things, sir, and they'll blow off their little arms, sir, and their little legs, sir. Then think of their poor mothers' feelings. So I just collected these few bombs, sir, really in order to save those little children, sir." So he was acquitted as a philanthropist.

While I am on the subject of bombs, I may say what happened to a boy of the Gloucester Battalion in Gallipoli. The boy was an agricultural laborer before the war and rather stronger in the arm than in the head. A friend came to his mother and said: "Oh, Mrs. Brown, what news have you of Bert?" Mrs. Brown beamed all over her face and said: "Oh, our Bert, he have had a narrow escape. He was in Gallipoli and there come a Turk and flung one of they bombs, and the bomb fell just at our Bert's feet, but our Bert he never hesitate, he pick it up, and he flung it