All the talent is here--all the great and the lesser, The proud and the humble, the stout and the slim, The second form boy and the aged professor, Grade three and the hero in want of a limb. Four years of war have brought curious changes to "our village": Our baker's in the Flying Corps, Our butcher's in the Buffs, Our one policeman cares no more For running in the roughs, But carves a pathway to the stars As trooper in the Tenth Hussars. The Mayor's a Dublin Fusilier, The clerk's a Royal Scot, The bellman is a brigadier And something of a pot; The barber, though at large, is spurned; The Blue Boar's waiter is interned. The postman, now in Egypt, wears A medal on his coat; The vet. is breeding Belgian hares, The vicar keeps a goat; The schoolma'am knits upon her stool; The village idiot gathers wool. [Illustrations: FARMER AND THE FARM LABOURER First week Second week Third week Fourth week] The husbandman and his new help have undergone mutual transformation. And our cadet battalions are making themselves very much at home at Oxford and Cambridge. [Illustration: CADET: "Really, from the way these College Authorities make themselves at home you'd think the place belonged to them."] The Navy still remains the silent Service, but, as the need for reticence is being relaxed by the triumph of our arms, we are beginning to learn something, though unofficially as yet, of that "plaything of the Navy and nightmare of the Huns"--the Q-boat: She can weave a web of magic for the unsuspecting foe, She can scent the breath of Kultur leagues away, She can hear a U-boat thinking in Atlantic depths below And disintegrate it with a Martian ray; She can feel her way by night Through the minefield of the Bight; She has all the tricks of science, grave and gay. In the twinkle of a searchlight she can suffer a sea-change From a collier to a _Shamrock_ under sail, From a Hyper-super-Dreadnought, old Leviathan at range, To a lightship or a whaler or a whale; With some canvas and a spar She can mock the morning star As a haystack or the flotsam of a gale. She's the derelict you chartered north of Flores outward-bound, She's the iceberg that you sighted coming back, She's the salt-rimed Biscay trawler heeling home to Plymouth Sound, She's the phantom-ship that crossed the moon-beams' track; She's the rock where none should be In the Adriatic Sea, She's the wisp of fog that haunts the Skagerrack. Recognition of services faithfully done is an endless task; but Mr. Punch is glad to print the valedictory tribute of one of the boys in blue to a V.A.D.--a class that has come in for much undeserved criticism. While willy-nilly I must go A-hunting of the Hun, You'll carry on--which now I know (Although I've helped to rag you so) Means great work greatly done.