[Illustration: _Enthusiast_. "AS A PATRIOT, MADAM, WILL YOU SIGN THE
ROLL OF HONOUR OF 'THE NO-SUPERFLUOUS-TRAVEL-BUT-GIVE-UP-YOUR-SEATS-
TO-SOLDIERS-AND-SAILORS-AS-MUCH-AS-POSSIBLE LEAGUE'?"]

* * * * *

THE WATCH DOGS.

LIV.

My Dear Charles,--What about this Peace? I suppose that, what with
your nice new Governments and all, this is the very last thing you
are thinking of making at the moment. I wouldn't believe that the old
War was ever going to end at all if it wasn't for the last expert and
authoritative opinion I hear has been expressed by our elderly barber
in Fleet Street. At the end of July, 1914, he told me confidentially,
as he snipped the short hairs at the back of my head, that there was
going to be no war; the whole thing was just going to fizzle out. Now
he says it is going to be a very, very long business, as he always
thought it would.

I find it difficult to maintain consistently either the detached point
of view, in which one discusses it as if it was a European hand of
bridge, or the purely interested point of view, in which one regards
it only as a matter affecting one's individual comfort. I know a Mess,
well up in the Front where they measure the mud by feet, in which
they were discussing the War raging at their front door as if it had
nothing to do with them beyond being a convenient thing to criticise.
Men who were then likely to be personally removed at any moment by