Various

“ For although I cannot meet thee
In the flesh, I still can greet thee,
William Shakspeare, as a worthy brother bard.
In these times of stress and passion,
When the sword is all the fashion,
Only minstrelsy can keep the world in tune ”

“ At home the mouse is regarded with contemptuous annoyance as a petty but persevering thief; while the rat commits his grosser depredations in an atmosphere tinged with horror. Out here it is different, for we are perforce neighbours. Indeed, we bipeds are in a sense trespassers upon the domain of the subterranean peoples. At home one seldom sees a rat or mouse save from above, and to look down upon anything is invariably to misjudge it. ”

“ In the trenches themselves the rat is almost a domestic animal. Town rats are lean, persecuted and vicious; nobody loves them. But those who hobnob with us here are fed, like our Army, on Army rations, together with more than their share of private luxuries, and consequently are stout and contented-looking, and display none of the ill-bred and disconcerting haste of the hereditary fugitive of our drains and cellars. ”

“ Gas helmets always exercise a peculiar fascination for people who inspect trenches, and the matter was now especially prominent in the mind of the Commander as he marched along, outwardly appearing to be at his happiest here, inwardly thanking goodness that his home was elsewhere. Conceive his delight to discover a subaltern, fresh from ablutions, with no satchel upon him! ”

“ No end of a joke for the quartermaster to try and get a man who allowed his wife four thousand a year to deduct sixpence a week to send to her! I thought I should have died of laughing."
The first soldier remained impassive. "And what happened?" he asked at last.
"What happened?"
"Yes, what was done about it? The sixpence, I mean. Did he agree to send it?"
The second soldier pulled himself together. "Oh, I don't know," he said shortly. "That's not the point."
"After all," the other continued, "the regulations say that married men have to deduct sixpence for their wives, don't they?" ”

“ Charles Hawtrey bring to the situation gives it almost an air of possibility. But, once we are at Ostend, and have been introduced to Trotter's incredibly inappropriate fiancée (she is a niece of the same aunt and has followed under protection of a tame escort) , we are prepared to launch freely and fearlessly into the rough and tumble of farce.
It is in vain that Miss Gladys Cooper, over her petit déjeuner, preserves a natural demeanour, even to the point of talking with her mouth full; the light humour of the First Act declines to the verge of buffoonery. ”

“ I am wet under and through and over everything—wet, not with rain, but with mud. You have heard that there is mud in Flanders?
But the worst part really is the number of hours in a day; we have as many as ten nowadays in which movement is simply not done. Where dawn finds you, dusk releases you. That is here; I believe we have some real trenches somewhere behind. But we of the ten hours' stretch run out of employment early in the morning and remain there the rest of the day. Of course you can eat—if your rations really came up last night—but not, I think, continuously for ten hours. ”

“ Do they admit our right to apply the principles which were applied by the American Government in the War between North and South—to apply those principles to modern conditions and to do our best to prevent trade with the enemy through neutral countries? ”

“ Opposing a suggestion of the Wandsworth Borough Council to discontinue the issue of fiction from the free libraries, a member of the Women's Freedom League said that a novel was to a woman what a pipe was to a man. Well, not quite, perhaps. We never saw a man begin a pipe at the wrong end. ”

“ No such thing; the old gentleman becomes a more ardent militarist every day; wants to see once for all an end of all lawyer-politicians, and all so-called "business-men." "We have made a poor show of being civilians," is his point; "let's try being soldiers for a generation or two."
On the whole he thinks we should find it easier to carry on as a British Empire in uniform than as a German province in mufti. He says that what's wrong with Prussian Militarism is that it is Prussian; to succeed, the thing has to be run by gentlemen.
A Top-man honoured our mess the other night. ”

“ The English are given up to games, and their mercenary army—I have it on the highest authority—cannot for a moment stand against our German heroes. The Russians are slow and disorganised and useless for war. For me you need not be afraid, my dear. In this war a man of my age will not be required." So he spoke; and now where is he and what has become of him? He has lost a leg, his right hand has been shot through, and he is in a hospital in Poland. ”

“ Everybody halted, and the air became pregnant with possibilities.... It was a nicely calculated speech, leading up gradually to the pointed contrast between (a) overworked Commander, weighed down with responsibilities, absorbed day and night in momentous matters of large principle, nevertheless infallible on smallest detail and now in possession of gas helmet, one, and (b) very junior subaltern, free to enjoy the open-air irresponsible life of the trenches, yet neglecting even the few small matters entrusted to him, without same. ”

“ A suggestion has been made by a Registrar in Bankruptcy that the Tercentenary of Shakspeare's death should be celebrated by the performance in every large town of one of the Bard's plays; and some regret has been expressed that anybody should take advantage of a national celebration to boom his own business.
"'How many of us realise that, were it not for America, the War to-day in Europe, as fought, could not even exist?'" is the question put, according to a New York correspondent, "by Mr. Gutzon Borglum, the great American sculptor." Still the War has its compensations. ”

“ We are prepared to do what we can, but we think, too, that since we have been so magnificently victorious we should have peace quickly, so that we may all once more try to have some happiness in this world. ”

“ Eric Lewis as Emily's father, Mr. Frederick Kerr as Sir Samuel, Miss Helen Haye in the thankless part of Julia, and Mr. Nigel Playfair as a self-effacing phantom of a lover. All were in great form; but, next to Miss Gladys Cooper, whose natural charm and ingenuous espièglerie were a perpetual delight, I offer my profoundest compliments to the short but extraordinarily clever performance of Mr. H. R. Hignett as Trotter's man Francis. ”

“ He's a jolly old Lieutenant of about fifty years; he has a concentrated experience of the world but doesn't remember having been mixed up in a big European war before. At first I kept on telling him that business is one thing and war is another, but he wouldn't see it and persisted in doing and saying and thinking things which were bound to land us in a national disaster. He had no respect whatever for the Pass Memo., his central and sole idea being to push along with the elimination of the Bosch. ”

“ His principles conquer his desire for children, and his decision is communicated to the fiery Elizma, who, fierce maternalist that she is and coming of a wild stock that never stuck at anything, undertakes a desperate flirtation by way of solving the difficulty in her own heroic way—at least you will certainly make this kind of a guess, but on investigation you may find that you've been wrong! ”

“ There's many a kind heart behind a Buff slip, and we all have our little weaknesses." The idea of having a little weakness was so novel to the Top-man that it caused him to choke and to be led from the mess, eventually, in a state of nervous exhaustion.
The latest information from the trenches goes to support the maxim that all one requires to wage war is a bold face and a gas helmet. ”

“ Our food, like everything else we have to buy, is so dear that we women find it above all things difficult to provide ourselves with what we need for our daily life, and the worst of it, they say, has not yet come. ”

“ Miss Muriel Hine in The Individual (Lane) , essaying a problem novel, does not disdain the old-fashioned way of the woven plot and the dramatic incident. Her hero, Orde Taverner, surgeon by trade and eugenist by profession, falls in love with Elizma, a Cornish beauty and rare fiddler. His inquiries as to her eugenical fitness having been answered satisfactorily but inaccurately, he marries, to find that Elizma's mother really died insane. ”

“ The scandal of his daughter's conduct leaves him indifferent, for a long and varied experience of the morals of many lands, in the course of which he has married as many as eighteen wives, having made a point of adopting for the time being the system—polygamous or other—of the country in which he happens to find himself, has taught him that nothing is right or wrong except as local opinion makes it so. ”

“ She really comes of quite untainted stock, so the eugenist is satisfied and husband and wife reconciled. That is to say the author runs away from her problem, which was perhaps, all things considered, the wisest thing to do. She has some eye for character and has made a good thing of her Elizma, but has let herself scatter her energies over a team too large to be driven with a sure hand. And why, oh why did she drag in the War? ”

“ My wife often muses as to the real cause of the general superiority of dwellers in the country over the apologies for humanity who live in towns. She says it is moral fibre. She comes from the country herself and is quite unbiassed. ”

“ Well, we have had victories in plenty, according to the Generals. Every time we move from one place to another we gain, it seems, an overwhelming triumph and cause to fly every one who is opposed to us. ”

“ When Hargrave Ladd, who was a solicitor in a very fair way of business, with an agreeable but unemotional wife, happened to be getting into an omnibus at the moment when Stella Rayne fell off the top of it, he unconsciously put himself in the way of a lot of bother. Naturally, as a gentleman and the male protagonist of a novel—Let Be (Methuen) —he could do no less than pick the girl out of the mud and see her home in a cab. Whether, quite strictly speaking, he need have called next day to see how she was getting over the accident is another matter. Certainly his interfering aunt, Mrs. ”

“ Austrians and Hungarians are said to be quarrelling as to whether the occupied Serbian territory should eventually belong to the Monarchy or the Kingdom, and the jurists on either side are ransacking the history of the past for arguments to support their respective cases. Here we have another instance of the fondness of learned men for disputing about purely academic questions. ”

“ The demoralisation of the Austrian forces, even when advancing, is so strikingly presented that one cannot doubt their dependence on German domination and German batteries to hold them together at all. ”

“ With instinct of good Liberal—in his time Philip Stanhope was known in the Commons as an almost dangerous Radical—he turned and rent "certain leaders who have surrendered a precious principle and in so doing are undermining the authority and existence of the whole Liberal Party." ”

“ Although incidentally it is to be praised as a modest and lucid piece of writing, well in keeping with the character of an author whose habit of viewing an action from the most dangerous, because the most interesting, point can be discovered only by reading between the lines, primarily it is to be prescribed as a sovereign tonic against German-made depression. ”

“ We cannot agree with the actor who complains that his manager forbids him to wear his armlet on the stage. The sympathies of the audience might be entirely deranged by the discovery that the elderly villain was an attested patriot while the young and beautiful hero was either ineligible or a slacker. ”

“ Thrice and four times have I come and come back to this battalion, and every blessed time they've been either in trenches when I arrived, or situated directly behind the trenches and going up, it might be, to make some more.
Sometimes we go up to dig, sometimes to carry, sometimes both. ”

“ We are allowed to gather that heredity may have had some influence in the moulding of Emily's character; and if we may hope for its continuance into the next generation there seems every prospect that the children she may bear to Trotter (now released from Julia and free to marry the right woman) will not have their development hampered by excess of prudery.
Mr. Charles Hawtrey as Trotter played with his old easy skill and seemed to take a more than usual interest in the play. He was supported (as they say) by a particularly brilliant cast, including Miss Lottie Venne as the aunt, Mr. ”

“ Certainly he will help himself to a little cake, if such a thing is to be had, for he feels at home, as he doubtless wishes you to do. If you do not care to share your dainties, you can hang them from the roof. ”

“ The Weary Weardale, who through long public life has tried in succession both branches of the Legislature and found them equally withered, was doubtful whether the measure would appreciably affect its avowed purpose of increasing number of men with the Colours. ”

“ It was a bad case. It had ten per cent. too much of this, and fifteen per cent. too much of that, and the rest was the cheapest margarine and stirring. There wasn't a cow within five miles of her place and he didn't believe she had ever seen one.
We haven't met Lucy since. My wife says that Wordsworth was often taken in, just like that. And she has heard, anyhow, that Lucy was born in Bradford. So that it proves nothing.
Hymn for Volunteer Corps digging trenches for the defence of London:—
"O Parados! ”