Of our soldiers we at home cannot be too proud, from Field-Marshal to officer’s servant.  As one of Mr. Punch’s correspondents at the front writes:  “Dawn to me hereafter will not be personified as a rosy-fingered damsel or a lovely swift-footed deity, but as a sturdy little man in khaki, crimson-eared with cold, heralded and escorted by frozen wafts of outer air, bearing in one knobby fist a pair of boots, and in the other a tin mug of black and smoking tea.”  As for the charities and courtesies of war, as interpreted by our soldiers, Mr. Punch can wish for no better illustration than in these lines on “The German graves”: 

  I wonder are there roses still
    In Ablain St. Nazaire,
  And crosses girt with daffodil
    In that old garden there. 
  I wonder if the long grass waves
    With wild-flowers just the same,
  Where Germans made their soldiers’ graves
    Before the English came?

  The English set those crosses straight
    And kept the legends clean;
  The English made the wicket-gate
    And left the garden green;
  And now who knows what regiments dwell
    In Ablain St. Nazaire? 
  But I would have them guard as well
    The graves we guarded there.

  And when at last the Prussians pass
    Among those mounds and see
  The reverent cornflowers crowd the grass
    Because of you and me,
  They’ll give, perhaps, one humble thought
    To all the “English fools”
  Who fought as never men have fought
    But somehow kept the rules.

[Illustration:  MADE IN GERMANY

CIVILISATION:  “What’s that supposed to represent?”

IMPERIAL ARTIST:  “Why, ‘Peace,’ of course.”

CIVILISATION:  “Well, I don’t recognise it—­and I never shall.”]

To turn from the crowning ordeal of our Armies to the activities of British politicians on the eve of the great German attack is not a soul-animating experience.  Indeed, the efforts of Messrs. Snowden and Trevelyan, Pringle and King almost justify the assumption that Hindenburg would have launched his offensive earlier but for his desire not to interfere with the great offensive conducted by his friends on the Westminster front.  Our anti-patriots, however, are placed in a dilemma.  They were bound to side with Germany, because of their rooted belief that England always must be wrong.  They were bound to hail the Bolshevik self-determinators because of their entirely sound views on peace at any price.  But now their two loves are fighting like cats.  Hence the problem:  “Which am I (both can’t well be right), Pro-German or Pro-Trotskyite?” Discussions of pig shortage, commandeered premises, the relations of the Government and Press, and the duties of the Directors of Propaganda leave us cold or impatient.  But members of all parties have been united in genuine grief over the death of Mr. John Redmond, snatched away just when his distracted country most needed