ONE OF THE PUNCH BRIGADE.

[Footnote A:  Physical training.]

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“The Home Secretary gives notice that summer time will be brought into force this year on the morning of Sunday, March 30, and will continue until the night of Sunday-Monday; September 28129.”—­Scots Paper.

By which time, it is confidently expected, the Peace Conference will be over.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Road Sweeper.  “WOT’S BECOME O’ BILL?  I ’AVEN’T SEEN ’IM FOR MONTHS.”

Female ditto.  “BILL!  WHY, ’AVEN’T YOU HEARD?  ’E’S PROMOTED.  ’E’S ON THE BINS.”]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)

MR. H.M.  HYNDMAN brings to Clemenceau:  the Man and his Time (GRANT RICHARDS) a specialised knowledge of the intricacies of French politics, personal friendship with his subject and a sympathy not discounted by profound differences of opinion.  Here is one veteran fighting man writing a brilliant (I don’t use the word as a cliche) chronicle and commentary of the battles of another, battles which cover the same period and were fought broadly for the same causes.  But the French Radical extremist could never see his way to subscribe to the Socialist creed.  His stalwart individualism, in part temperamental, was also as a political working faith the result of a distrust of logic divorced from the experience and responsibility of actual administration.  Somewhat similarly the English Socialist refused to let logic press him into the premature Internationalism of so many of his associates, nor did he share their trust, so ruthlessly betrayed, in German Social Democracy as having either the power or the serious intention of thwarting German Imperialism.  If a man’s achievement be rightly gauged by the difficulties he has overcome, then M. CLEMENCEAU, called unwillingly and unwilling at the most desperate crisis of the destiny of a distracted and dispirited France hammered by the enemy’s legions and with the pass ready for sale by false friends, may well justify Mr. HYNDMAN’S verdict on him as the statesman of the Great War.  The man who came into the War a mere Tiger will go out of it an authentic Lion.

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“Miss BERTA RUCK” is among the few writers from whom I can really enjoy stories about the War.  She has an engaging way with her that can turn even that (at least the more endurable aspects of it) to favour and prettiness.  And in The Land Girl’s Love Story (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), a theme after her own heart, she has given us what is, I think, her best achievement so far.  It is an excellent slight tale of two heroines who took their patriotic turn at the work of the land army on a Welsh farm, and the adventures, agricultural and (of course) amorous,