"Mr. Punch's History of the Great War" is a History we can all read, and all _should_ read, for here is the record of the heroes who added to the glories of our blood and State--a roll that is endless--wonderful gunners and sappers, and airmen and despatch riders, devoted surgeons and heroic nurses, stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers. "But Mr. Punch's special heroes are the Second-Lieutenants and the Tommy who went on winning the War all the time, and never said that he was winning it until it was won."
To read this book will help us to realise the great debt, unpaid and unpayable, to our immortal dead and to the valiant survivors, to whom we owe freedom and security.
It is "a corrective record," says _The Times_, "not only of what happened 'over there,' but of what people were saying and feeling at home"; while _The Morning Post_ remarked: "Here Mr. Punch is the nation, deftly wielding the weapon of ridicule that has helped to kill so many enemy tyrants."
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THE CAMEL DRIVER. "NOW, WHICH HUMP HAD THIS BETTER GO ON?"
THE CAMEL. "IT'S ALL THE SAME TO ME. IT'S BOUND TO BREAK MY BACK ANYHOW."]
[Illustration: _Old Josh (who has just purchased stamp)._ "WOULD YER MIND A-STICKIN' OF IT ON FOR ME, MISSIE? OI BAIN'T NO SCHOLARD."]
Which is boyhood's commonest ambition, to run away to sea or to be something on a railway line? And how few, when they are grown up, find that they have realised either of these desires! The present Minister of Transport has freely confessed to his intimates that more than once, when he was floating paper-boats in his bath or climbing a tree in the garden to look out for icebergs from the crow's-nest, he felt in his child's heart that water was the ultimate quest, the adventure, the gleam. And yet for many a long year railways entranced and enslaved him. Often he would sit for hours, forgetful of the griddle cakes rapidly being burnt to a cinder, and gaze at the puffs of steam coming from the spout of the kettle or the quick vibrations of its lid, planning in his mind some greater and better engine that should be known perhaps as The Snorting Eric, and be enshrined in glass on Darlington platform.