writing in the _Edinburgh Evening News_, hits the true
sentiment towards Bairnsfather of the Army in France when he writes:

"To us out here the 'Fragments' are the very
quintessence of life. We sit moping over a smoky
charcoal fire in a dug-out. Suddenly someone, more
wide-awake than others remembers the 'Fragments.'
Out it comes, and we laugh uproariously over each
picture. For are these not the very things we are
witnessing every day, incidents full of tragic
humour? The fed-up spirit you see on the faces of
Bairnsfather's pictures is a sham--a mask beneath
which there lies something that is essentially
British."

[Illustration]

In a communication received by Captain Bairnsfather an eminent Member of
Parliament writes: "You are rising to be a factor in the situation, just
as Gillray was a factor in the Napoleonic wars." The difference is,
however, that instead of turning his satire exclusively upon the enemy,
as did Gillray, Captain Bairnsfather turns his--good-humouredly
always--on his fellow-warriors. This habit of ours of making fun of
ourselves has come by now to be fairly well understood by even the most
sensitive and serious-minded of our continental friends and neighbours.
It hardly needs nowadays to be pointed out that it is a fixed condition
of the national life that wherever Britons are working together in any
common object, whether in school, college, profession, or even warfare,
they must never _appear_ to be regarding their occupation too seriously.
Those who know us--and who, nowadays, has the excuse for not knowing us,
seeing how very much we have been discussed?--understand that our
frivolity is apparent and not real. Because we have the gift of
laughter, we are no less appreciative of grim realities than are our
scowling enemies, and nobody knows that better in these days than those
scowling enemies themselves.

Their hymns of hate and prayers for punishment have been impotent
expressions of exasperation at our coolness, deliberation, and
inflexible determination--qualities they had deluded themselves before
the war into believing would prove all a sham before the first blast of
frightfulness. They told themselves that, a war once actually begun, the
imperturbable pipe-smoking John Bull would be transformed into a
cowering craven. More complete confusion of this false belief is nowhere