I've smoked baksheesh in pagodas, stood a Dago Scotch-and-sodas, Scaled the mighty Mississippi's snow-clad peaks, Galloped madly on a llama through lagoons at Yokohama And found rubies at Magillicuddy's Reeks. Where the Tagus joins the Hooghly I have bowled the wily googly, I have heard the howdah's howl at Hyderabad; On a rickshaw I've gone sailing, with my boomerang impaling Hooded cobras on the ice-floes off Bagdad. I have slain the beri-beri with a ball from my knobkerry; I have climbed the Pole and leapt across the Line; I've seen seals in Abyssinia and volcanoes in Virginia, And I've dived into the shark-infested Rhine. From the pemmican's fierce claws and the tiffin's gaping jaws I have never shrunk in abject terror yet; In the jungle I have tracked them and attacked them and then hacked them Into mincemeat with my trusty calumet. I have interviewed the MULLAH, KRUGER, MENELIK, ABDULLAH, LOBENGULA, SITTING BULL and Clan-na-Gael; When I think of where I've been, what I've done and what I've seen, I'm surprised that I'm alive to tell the tale. * * * * * [Illustration: _Standing Lady_. "MY HUSBAND WAS MADE A COLONEL JUST BEFORE THE ARMISTICE." _Seated ditto_. "MY HUSBAND WOULD HAVE BEEN A GENERAL IF IT HADN'T BEEN FOR THE WAR."] * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_BY MR. PUNCH'S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS_). Battle-books have already come to wear (even in so short a time) a strangely archaic aspect. But _Through the Hindenburg Line_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is, as its name tells you, nearer to date than most. The writer, Mr. F.A. MCKENZIE, was a Canadian war correspondent whom the Canadian Staff, believing (as he himself says) "that the right place for a war correspondent is where he can see what he is supposed to describe," allowed to live among the troops in the front line. As a result of this unusual privilege, his pictures of the great fights in the last stages of the War have the reality of personal experience. The actual smashing of the Line, for example, is an epic of heroism and achievement still hardly realised by people at home, who cling to an idea that the final victories were gained over an enemy enfeebled and at disadvantage. There are other chapters in the record that may perhaps hardly be welcomed at this moment by those amiable sentimentalists who would have us treat the enemy as a Bosch and a brother. The hospital raid at Etaples is one of them; when, even after the light of the burning huts had made ignorance impossible, the gentle Hun, swooping low, swept with machine-gun fire the nurses and doctors who were attempting to remove the wounded. That, I think, is a memory that will linger. Another picture, queerly disproportionate in the anger it excites, is that of the fruit garden in a great country house, with its wealth of famous old peach and pear trees still in