I had, of course, heard of U.A. as a menace, a hidden terror, the old man's dread, the _bon vivant's_ heritage, and so forth. But only vaguely. No one had talked about it; I had seen the words in advertisements and had forgotten them again. I had never associated myself with them. Whatever might happen to me, U.A. would be unrepresented. And then the blow fell. Suddenly U.A. became omnipresent. I met a friend who only last week I had found doing himself with his customary thoroughness at dinner. This evening he was dining again, but his sole companion was a chilly and depressing bottle of French natural water. "What is this?" I asked. "War economy?" "No," he said; "merely U.A." I should have thought little of that were it not that half-an-hour later I overheard two men talking about the difficulty of getting rid of U.A. once it had established itself. Another man, to whom I complained of some trifling discomfort, said it was probably U.A. An hour later I was sitting at a farce which, like all the farces in London at the present moment, is the funniest thing ever staged--only this, if the management is to be believed, is more so; and the only thing I was able to laugh at was a joke about U.A. The next morning I received a letter from a solicitous relation warning me to be more careful or I should be at the mercy of U.A. And to crown all I went to see a doctor about something really quite negligible, and, after beginning by conjecturing that it was due to U.A., he ended by feeling certain of it. He asked me a hundred questions about myself, and after every reply he said either, "That's U.A.," or "U.A. again." "Almost everything that is wrong with people," he said finally, "is caused by U.A." I came away feeling thoroughly fashionable, but also dejected beyond words, for he had condemned me to a _régime_ from which every spark of happiness was excluded. I have since become a source of embarrassment to my friends, for more than half the nice things that everyone else eats and all the nice things that they drink are denied me. U.A. forbids. Wine--oh no. Spirits--not on your life. Underdone beef--poison. Tobacco--very unwise. And so forth. As for my own kitchen, which does not think very quickly, it considers me mad; and after one of the melancholy meals that are now my lot I am disposed to agree. The question I ask myself is, Which is it to be--a long life of joyless food and no U.A., or a shorter but merrier life with U.A. thrown in? And "What's the harm in a little U.A. anyway?" I say as I light a forbidden cigar. However I answer the great problem, of one thing I am certain, and that is that with all this U.A. about there ought to be a restaurant with enough intelligence to provide an anti Uric Acid menu. * * * * * From a description of the German assaults at Verdun:-- "The last regiment, which attacked in ass formation, was terribly handled."