* * * * * A VANISHED SPECIES. THE great auk is but a memory; the bittern booms more rarely in our eastern marshes; and now they tell me Brigadiers are extinct. Handsomest and liveliest of our indigenous fauna, the bright beady eye, the flirt of the trench coat-tail through the undergrowth, the glint of red betwixt the boughs, the sudden piercing pipe--how well I knew them, how often I have lain hidden in thickets and behind hedgerows to study them more closely. How inquisitive the creature was, yet how seldom would it feed from the hand. And now, it seems, they are gone. Vainly I rack my brains to envisage the manner of their passing. Is there to be nothing left but silence and a shadow or a specimen in a dusty case of glass preserved in creosol and stuffed with lime? Or did not the Brigadiers rather, when they felt their last hour was upon them, retire like the elephants of the jungle to some distant spot and shuffle off the mortal coil in the midst of Salisbury Plain or (for so I still picture it despite the ravages of a rude commercialism) the vast solitude of Slough? Or it may be that they underwent some classic metamorphosis, translated to a rainless paradise, where they dreamed of battalions for ever inspected and the general salute eternally blown. "And there, they say, two bright and aged snakes Who once were brigadiers of infantry Bask in the sun." Anyhow, I cannot believe that ex-Brigadiers die. They only fade away. Fade away, I think, like the Cheshire Cat in _Alice in Wonderland_, leaving at the last not a grin but a scowl behind them. "_Brigadiers will fade away_," I imagine, ran the instruction from the Army Council, "_passing the vanishing point in the following order:--_ (1) _Spurs._ (2) _Field Boots._ (3) _Main body._ (4) _Brass hat._ (5) _Scowl._" But oh, how they will be missed, with their insatiable hunger for replies! I remember one in particular, very fierce and black-moustached, who used to pop up suddenly from behind a Loamshire hedge with an enormous note-book in his hand and say to unhappy company commanders, "The situation is so-and-so and so-and-so; now let me hear you give your orders." And the Company-Commander, who would have liked to read through _Infantry Training_ once or twice and then hold a sort of inter-allied conference with his Platoon-Commander, putting the Company Sergeant-Major in the chair, felt that after frightfulness of this kind mere actual war would probably be child's-play. And yet they tell me he was a pleasant enough fellow in the Mess, this Brigadier, and liked good cooking. Now I come to think of it, he faded away before the War came to an end. He faded away into a Major-General.