their canes," says the newspaper, and so forth, and so forth. Captain
A. Radclyffe Dugmore, in a spirited drawing of the Battle of the Somme,
shows an officer leading a charge waving a light cane. As an emblem of
rank the cane among our Allies has apparently supplanted the sword.
Something of the dapper, cocky look of our brothers in arms on our
streets undoubtedly is due to their canes. One never sees a British,
French or Italian officer in the rotogravure sections without his cane.
We should be as startled to see General Haig or the Prince of Wales
without a cane as without a leg. With our own soldiers the cane does
not seem to be so much the thing, at least over here. I have a friend,
however, who went away a private with a rifle over his shoulder. The
other day came news from him that he had become a sergeant, and,
perhaps as proof of this, a photograph of himself wearing a tin hat and
with a cane in his hand. It is also to be observed now and then that a
lady in uniformed service appears to regard it as an added military
touch to swing a cane.

Women as well as men play their part in the colourful story of the
cane. The shepherdess's crook might be regarded as the precursor of
canes for ladies. In Merrie England in the age when the May-pole
flourished it was fashionable, we know from pictures, for comely misses
and grandes dames to sport tall canes mounted with silver or gold and
knotted with a bow of ribbon. The dowager duchess of romantic story
has always appeared leaning upon her cane. Do not we so see the rich
aunt of Hawden Crawley? And Mr. Walpole's Duchess of Wrexe, certainly,
was supported in her domination of the old order of things by a cane.
The historic old croons of our own early days smoked a clay or a
corn-cob pipe and went bent upon a cane.

In England to-day it is swagger for women to carry sticks--in the