* * * * * [Illustration: _Enthusiast_. "AS A PATRIOT, MADAM, WILL YOU SIGN THE ROLL OF HONOUR OF 'THE NO-SUPERFLUOUS-TRAVEL-BUT-GIVE-UP-YOUR-SEATS- TO-SOLDIERS-AND-SAILORS-AS-MUCH-AS-POSSIBLE LEAGUE'?"] * * * * * THE WATCH DOGS. LIV. My Dear Charles,--What about this Peace? I suppose that, what with your nice new Governments and all, this is the very last thing you are thinking of making at the moment. I wouldn't believe that the old War was ever going to end at all if it wasn't for the last expert and authoritative opinion I hear has been expressed by our elderly barber in Fleet Street. At the end of July, 1914, he told me confidentially, as he snipped the short hairs at the back of my head, that there was going to be no war; the whole thing was just going to fizzle out. Now he says it is going to be a very, very long business, as he always thought it would. I find it difficult to maintain consistently either the detached point of view, in which one discusses it as if it was a European hand of bridge, or the purely interested point of view, in which one regards it only as a matter affecting one's individual comfort. I know a Mess, well up in the Front where they measure the mud by feet, in which they were discussing the War raging at their front door as if it had nothing to do with them beyond being a convenient thing to criticise. Men who were then likely to be personally removed at any moment by it saw nothing in the progress of it to be depressed about. As the evening wore on and they all came to find that they knew much more about the subject than they supposed, they were prepared to increase the allowance of casualties in pressing the merits of their own pet schemes. No gloom arose from the possibility that this generous offer might well include their own health and limbs. There was no gloom; there was even no desire to change the subject. Indeed, the better to continue it they called for something to drink. There was nothing to drink, announced the Mess Orderly. Why was there nothing to drink? asked the Mess President, advocate of enormous offensives on a wide front for an indefinite period of years, if need be. The Mess Orderly explained that more drink was on order, it had not arrived because of difficulties of carriage. Why were there difficulties of carriage? Because of the War. "Confound the War," said the Mess President. "It really is the most infernal nuisance."