Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/277

Optimistic Old Gentleman (in darkened street). "Well, that's the first time for three weeks. I'm getting ever so much better at dodging 'em!"

We are coming to the end of a long journey. The end is Victoria, and the next trip begins after four days. Some of us are taking lessons in English already, and Smithson has picked up a Guide to London in this town, so wo ought to get on all right.

In the meantime we are finishing the first lap, as we began it, well to the back of all the fronts in the neighbourhood, learning the inner nature of the machine gun. In the trenches all you know about an m.g. is that it looks like a lump of mud with handles stuck on, and that its modus operandi is to wake up about 2 A.M., say pop-pop-pop, go to sleep again, and clear off in the morning just before the shells come along.

On closer acquaintance, machine guns have more in them than that. On account of these Germans I can't tell you everything about them, but the rough idea is that the m.g. is an accumulation of any number of odd-shaped bits which jam when you rotate the crank-handle. Gunnery consists in unjamming them. There are roughly 217 kinds of jam, not counting the one you can get by putting india-rubber and orange-peel into the gib-spring. The German gun is far superior, admitting of 532 variations, not counting those adventitiously induced by the insertion of leberwurst under the starboard buffer spring.

We grow handier day by day; this morning our brightest pair went into action in 4min. 29soc. It wasn't so much the time (standard, 40 seconds) that impressed the instructor as the ingenuity of the deed. We (I was one half) made the gun look so inoffensive that no Bosch could possibly have taken a counter-offensive against such an object. Not even a baby-killer would think of issuing an order like "Dilapidated mangle, half left, apparently struck by lightning, 700 yards, fire!" so completely had we disguised the death-dealing terror. Not less completely did the instructor disguise his admiration.

You should see our class. At all times we are a hive of unremitting industry; but most of all when it comes to cleaning the gun after firing. The instructor himself monopolizes the gun, fiddling about with that air of deft sagacity peculiar to the born mechanic. Whitton stands at the ready with the cleaning rod, every fibre alert, as he supports his supple frame against a pillar. Ingleby, seated, is seeing that nothing happens to the lock, while Burfield is looking round busily for the oil-tin. Not one of us but has a special job.

Those of us who meet our worries all the way are perturbed at the prospect of making our needs known in Teutonic. Ingleby only knows two words, to wit höchste gefechtsbereitschaft; and even with them he is not quite at ease. He can never remember whether they are one of the War Lord's shorter titles or the technical term for some breed of Westphalian sausage.

On the whole, however, we are too deeply absorbed in the machine gun to allow cosmopolitan predicaments of the near or far future to upset us. Whitton, who has undertaken to ring up about forty-five acquaintances on his arrival in town, is permanently depressed by the conviction that the only number he will be able to give the operator when called on will be "303 Maxim." And yet there are those among the authorities who complain that we take our instruction too light-heartedly.

"Wanted, yonng girl to assist with kennel of toy dogs, sleep in, wages 3s. 6d. per week."

Daily Mail.

In Orders at a certain Volunteer Rifle Camp of Exercise in Central India:—

"Any Volunteer improbably dressed will be arrested."

It is to avoid this painful contingency that our Volunteers at home are trying to get uniforms.