Lest I convey the impression that I had advocated rousing the British lion from his slumbers by wild and woolly western methods palpably unsuited to his stoical temperament, let me make haste to explain that I was pleading for nothing but a system which would, spectacularly if necessary, do something to let the British public at least know that they had a war on their hands, and popularize it. A great contingent of Indian troops, led by Maharajahs and Rajputs, Maliks, Rajahs and Jams, had arrived in Europe, tarried in England and been slipped, in the dead of a Channel night, across to France. An entire army from Canada was encamped on Salisbury Plain, and no one had seen a sign of it except an occasional detachment of boisterous subalterns, many with a pronounced "American accent," who had kicked up a row in some Leicester Square music-hall the night before. The Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square was desecrated with recruiting circus-bills which would have delighted the heart of Barnum, and every taxicab wind-shield in town beseeched passers-by to "enlist for the duration of the war." But why, I had had the temerity to inquire in my little "Wake Up, England!" homily, which was rejected because it revealed no insight into "British character," were not the turbaned Gurkhas and the swarthy Sikhs and the brown men from Punjab and Beluchistan brought to London-town and paraded up and down the Strand and the Embankment, for all the metropolis to have a priceless object-lesson in Imperial patriotism? Why was Kitchener allowed to intern the young giants in khaki from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia in the hidden recesses of the provinces, instead of giving Londoners a glimpse of Colonial love of mother country in the flesh? It was due to the Indians and to the Canadians themselves, no less than to London, I argued, that opportunity should be provided to pay homage to the men who had crossed the seas to fight for Motherland. Non-British though I am, I felt morally certain that even my Hoosier bosom would swell with emotion in the presence of so ocular a demonstration of Britain’s Imperial solidarity in the day of trial. But my suggestions were rejected as unbecomingly boisterous in their intent, good enough for the Polo Grounds or Madison Square Garden, but grotesquely out of place in England. If carried out, you see, they would inevitably have made the war "a bit conspicuous." [Illustration: Kitchener’s army]