German Sentry. "Who goes there?"
Turk. "A friend—curse you!"
THE ERROR.
It was on Monday, January 11, 1915. He had been reading The Daily Mail and suddenly he banged it down. "You can't believe what you see in the papers," he said.
"Since when?" I asked.
"I suppose always," he said, "but particularly to-day."
He was a nice young soldier on his way back to his camp after a holiday, and I guessed him, before he enlisted in Kitchener's army, to have been a provincial clerk or a salesman of some kind.
"Yes," he said; "and I know someone else who'll say the same when she sees it."
"Sees what?" I asked.
He found a paragraph in the paper—towards the foot of the Society column and placed his thumb on it.
"This," he said.
"Mayn't I see?" I asked.
He kept his thumb there.
"Yes, and her mother will have something to say to it too," he went on, "and"—he chuckled richly—"my mother too. The idea!"
"Mayn't I see it?" I asked again.
"As if nobody in this world mattered but toffs," he said. Perhaps they did so once; but they're not going to for ever, I can tell you."
"You're a Socialist?" I suggested.
"No, I'm not," he said. "I don't hold with Socialism. But I'm sure after this war's over toffs aren't going to be quite everything that they were before it began.
"The cheek of it!" he continued, with another glance at the paper. "Lumme, I'd like to be there when she lets herself go!"
"Your mother?" I said.
"No, I didn't mean her just then; but she'd be all right to listen to, too. She can't half speak her mind! No. I meant my fiancy. I've just left her; been there for Sunday."
"Have you been engaged long?" I asked.
He laughed. "No," he said. "That's the point. We only got engaged this year. I'd courted her a long time, but it wasn't till New Year's day that we fixed it up."
"I congratulate you," I said, "and her too. I think she's lucky to have a soldier for her husband. I hope you're both very happy."
"Happy!" he said; "I should think we were. That's what makes me so disgusted with this paper. Look at it."
At last he removed his thumb and showed me a paragraph beginning with the words, "The first interesting engagement of the New Year is that between Captain Dudley Hornby and Lady Marjorie Feilding."
"The 'first'!" he said scornfully. "The 'first'! She and her mother on that," he chuckled, "and my mother to help them! (We live close by). My, I wish I could be there to hear it. Give it me back, please; I must mark it and post it. What a time they'll have!"
I would like to be there too.
"A few days ago a military concert was given [at Antwerp], but upon the band striking up the tune of 'Heil dir im Siegerterang' the people hooted. They were thereupon charged by the police, and since that occasion mitrailleuses have been posted in front of the German musicians."
Glasgow Evening Times.
In this matter our sympathies are with the audience, because (1) It was surely entitled to hoot a band which did not know the name of its own National Anthem; (2) The police should not have been allowed to make any charge at a free concert.
