* * * * *

L’AGENT PROVOCATEUR.

A short while ago the following advertisement appeared in the “Personal” column of The Times:—­

    “Artist (33), literary, travelled, mentally isolated, would
    appreciate brilliant, interesting correspondents; writers’
    anonymity observed.”

Now thereby hang many tales (none of them necessarily true).  Here is one of them.

The Colonel of the Blank-blank Blankshires exclaimed (as all proper Colonels are expected to do), “Ha!” Carefully marking with a blue pencil a small paragraph on the front page of The Times, he threw it on the table among the attentive Mess and snorted.

“Ha!  A Cuthbert—­a genuine shirker!  I think some of you might oblige the gentleman.”

Then he stepped outside and went into the seventh edition of his impressionist sketch, “Farmyard of a French Farm,” with lots of BBB pencil for the manure heap.  He was a young C.O. and new to the regiment.

The Mess “carried on” the conversation.

“I’ll write to the blighter,” shouted the Junior Sub.  “I’ll be an awf’lly ‘interesting correspondent.’”

“And a brilliant one?” queried the Major.

“A Verey brilliant one, Sir,” asserted the Sub., giving a sample.

“This sort of slacker,” said the Senior Captain bitterly, as with infinite toil he scraped the last of the glaze from the inside of the marmalade pot, “is the sort that doesn’t realise that there’s a war on.”

“Don’t you make any mistake,” said the Major, “he knows, poor devil!  I’m going to write to him and say, ’When I think of the incessant strain of the trench warfare carried on with inadequate support by you civilians of military age against the repeated brutal attacks of tribunals, I marvel at the indomitable pluck you display.  In your place I should simply jack it up, plead ill-health and get into the Army.”

“I’ve got an idea,” said the Junior Sub., joyously.

“Consolidate it quickly,” said the Adjutant, “and prepare to receive counter-attacks.  Yes?”

“I’ve never yet been allowed to explain my side of that confounded affair of the revetments.  I’ll tell it all to Cuthbert. He’ll sympathise with me.  I’ll tell him all that the C.O. said and all that I should have liked to say to the C.O.  To pour out one’s troubles into a travelled literary bosom—­what a relief!”

“That’s rather an idea,” said the Senior Captain.  “I nurse a private grief of my own beneath a camouflage of—­of persiflage.  I think I shall ask Cuthbert’s opinion, as an artist, of a brother artist who himself does perfectly unrecognisable sketches of farm-yards”—­he waved a golden-syrup spoon towards the Colonel and the manure-heap—­“and yet demands a finnicking and altogether contemptible realism in the matter of trench maps.  Pass the honey, please.”