Under the circumstances it was not surprising to hear well-founded reports that recruiting was falling off. In the clubs men said that Kitchener’s "first half-million" was in hand, but that men for the second five hundred thousand, for which the War Office had now called, were holding back to a disappointing, and even disquieting, degree. Meantime the popular ballad of the hour was, appropriately, Paul Rubens’ "Your King and Country Want You"--"a women’s recruiting song," as its sub-title runs. Its opening verse and chorus tell their own story: We’ve watched you playing cricket And every kind of game. At football, golf and polo, You men have made your name. But now your country calls you To play your part in war, And no matter what befalls you, We shall love you all the more. So, come and join the forces As your fathers did before. CHORUS Oh! We don’t want to lose you, But we think you ought to go. For your King and your Country Both need you so! We shall want you, and miss you, But with all our might and main We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you, When you come back again! These words, in prosaic type, look banal. Their appeal seems trite. Yet rendered to plaintive melody by such an operatic artist as little Maggie Teyte, they went straight to men’s hearts. They must have sent thousands upon thousands of cricketers, footballers, golfers and poloists--that is a classification which takes in pretty nearly all Englishmen--into khaki and training-camps. But the growing insistence with which the walls and windows of Old England were plastered with recruiting posters--even entire front pages of newspapers were now employed to advertise that "Your King and Country Need You"--indicated that Kitchener’s army was not being built up yet by the desired leaps and bounds. Obviously the war needed some other kind of advertising than even the accomplished Mr. Le Bas could give it. It was not strange that the enthusiasm of Englishmen, cheated of the chance to know what was really going on at the front, was beginning to find expression in other directions. [Illustration: Greeting the Kaiser (in helmet) the day he declared Germany "in a state of war," July 31st, 1914.]