RE-VALUED IN THE TRENCHES.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 January 1916, Page 12

RE-VALUED IN THE TRENCHES.

ARTIFICIAL LINES DISAPPEAR. Here is a letter to a school-fellow from a Territorial in tlie trendies, and published in the English Journal of Education:— "My dear 'Socrates,'—You will be surprised at receiving a letter, which might as well be headed 'Somewhere in Hell,' from a man whose name you will surely remember, since it stood near your own on every prize-list and in every record of school matches for about five years in succession. Then came the cross-roads. You headed for Cambridge and a London parish, while my fortune led me through Oxford and a Classical Mastership to a sub-lieuten-ancy in the Terirtorials. "One of my Tommies, who was badly wounded the other day and rescued from the danger-zone by your, former 'half-back,' turns out to be a parishioner of yours. ITis account of your philanthropic energies reminded me so forcibly of the times when you encouraged the 'Soccer' team by Socmtie advice that 1 am tempted to write for the purpose of exhorting a reply. Several of our contemporaries, whom we used to classify by hasty standards, are out liere playing the game under ciroumstanee: which are real touchstones of character. "Inigo Jones, the immaculate, whose name was a passport to West End tailors, is one of the shabbiest men in my platoon. He is smart only in one and the best sense—at picking off more Bosches in one day that Smithers would miss in a month. You remember Smithers, the 'bug-hunter'? He threw up an entomological job at South Kensington, because lie heard that the fauna of the trenches would repay study. At least, that is the explanation given by his men (he lias lately won his second star), and they keep him well supplied with specimens. Then you cannot have forgotten little Abrahams, who by expensive coaching scraped into Sandhurst, but was expelled on account of some financial eccentricity? We find him mos'4 useful at interpreting the admissions of German prisoners (when we take any). His grandfather was born in the Frankfurt Ghetto; this makes htm as cunning as the Teutons, whom he loathes with compound hatred. "It is wonderful how artificial lines of demarcation tend to merge here in common comradeship, Military arrogance (as the pacifists call ii) is a minus quantity. 'The Terrier' is admitted to share the kennel of even pedigreed prodigies of the 'bulldog breed.' We have only one bone to pick—the bones of a Dachshund, . . .—Yours, as yet, Democritus."