Not a twitch of a single muscle in the face of the young subaltern, not a flicker of his unmonocled eye, betrayed that he was aware of anything unusual in the appearance of his men. He took the situation in coolly, and when, in answer to routine questions, the sergeants answered smartly and respectfully but with a pointed imitation of his own "haw-haw" accent, he ignored the studied insult with equal nonchalance. It was a good start, for an attempt at sarcasm when quietly ignored falls flatter even than when it is wholly unperceived. In the present case there was no possibility of an insult having been missed, and the platoon began to feel that things were not going quite as had been anticipated. Each man kept his identity disc firmly screwed in one eye, however, and stared fixedly out of the other in expectation of the officer's present discomfort. The latter could never afford to dismiss the parade without taking cognizance of what had occurred, and the platoon awaited the crux with interest. But the moment of dismissal arrived and nothing had been said. Some of the men were covertly smiling. As he gave the order, the subaltern let the monocle drop from his eye, and while the command was being obeyed, swung the glass round and round, with the cord between finger and thumb, in a rapid circle. Scanning the line narrowly and noting every glance upon him, he jerked the twirling glass suddenly into the air and with the neatness of a juggler caught it in his eye as it fell. Then he glared fiercely through it. "See if you can do _that_!" he observed. "Dis-MISS!" Thereafter no officer ever had men under him more ready to do whatever he asked them. And it was by a sure instinct that the latter "gave him best." As one of them remarked, "I've seen men take risks in my time, but that beat everything. _Suppose he'd missed catchin' that glass?_" If wit is a Gallic prerogative, humor belongs to the British, and not a few comedies of the war pivot on that uniquely humorous character Thomas Atkins. Humor is an elusive and baffling quantity, as the wit discovered who mixed up all the boots in an hotel corridor one evening and learned the next morning that his friend (a humorist) had sorted them out again as soon as his back was turned. The humorist can sometimes understand the wit, but the compliment is seldom, if ever, returned; which is the reason why Mr. Atkins and his idiosyncrasies remain an inscrutable enigma to our French allies.