Aug. 4
Tae average man probably finds it difficult to remember that it is nine years to-day since the Great War was entered upon, and so we may be permitted to give a reminder. It will not. come amiss, for to the majority these are unheroic days that we spend in Shanghai, and events conspire even to make us wonder whether we were the same people who used to make light of a day's march with a load of something like eighty pounds or at dead of night and on sodden ground handle a pick and shovel with a certain amount of skill. _Increasing girth in certain cases, with its inevitable accompaniment of a tendency to repose after tiffin, might almost be taken as suggesting that it was really somebody else who used to do exciting patrols in No man's Land, and if, in rummage ing among old trunks an army tunic emerges, the impossibility of ever synchronizing waistlines past and present seems to suggest that certain very important occurrences took place in a dim and distant past and in a world totally foreign to the present. One resident, we understand, only the other day caught his coolie trying to manipulate his once prized Sam Browne belt into something for tying uj) the dog, and it set him wondering. The job- was not an easy one, and he found himself on the horns of a dilemma—whether he should rate the coolie soundly for daring to put his badge of office to such a use, or whether he should help him in his task. Naturally, in the final event, he did nothing.
From one point of view it is deeply to, be regretted that memories are so transient, and that the unheroic days should have left people very much as they were before they went to war and did things which were a grown man's job. There was a great hope that the brotherhood of arms, which was one of the great realities of the war, would have eliminated the harshness of certain social distinctions, that a mutual apprecia ation of each other's qualities and difficulties would have softened the old conflict, that Gladstone's unhappy phrase the "classes and the masses' would no longer be worth considering. Unfortunately this has not been the case, and the trend of reports from Home indicates that we are back to where we used to be in these matters. The fact seems to be that as the world has got further away from the actual details of the struggle so has it from its better and nobler features. We shall be told that such was inevitable, but we venture to doubt the accuracy of this assertion. Today throughout the whole world' are to be seen organizations such as our own United Services Association, brought into being to keep together the men who fought and which are to-day doing a great work in giving 9 helping hand to those who have fallen by the way. They mean to go on with such work as long as the present generation is on hand, and in doing so they give an example which might with advantage be followed by the larger.comimunities through ut the nations. However much we may deplore the fact that they do not follow it, the fact cannot now be altered, but we may at any rate hope that the associations, based off the comradeship
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.