align="center">THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIERS
A negro drill sergeant was addressing a squad of colored “rookies” under him. He said: “I wants you niggers to understan’ dat you is to car’y out all o’ders giben on de risin’ reflection ob de final word ob comman’. Now when we’s passin’ dat reviewin’ stan’, at de comman’ ‘Eyes Right!’ I wants to hear ever’ nigger’s eyeballs click.”
NO FOOTSTEPS IN THE AIR
Dear Old Lady – “I suppose you’ll follow in your father’s footsteps when you grow up?”
“I can’t; he’s an airman.”
CHICKEN FEED ON BROADWAY
The very prosperous-looking gentleman stopped and permitted the very pretty girl to fasten a carnation in his buttonhole. Then he handed her a quarter.
“What is this for?” he asked.
“You have fed a Belgian baby,” was the reply.
“Nonsense,” said the other, adding a $5 bill to his contribution, “you can’t do it. Here, take this, and buy a regular meal for the baby.”
THIS WAS IN ENGLAND
Binks – “Ah, what a loss I have suffered in the death of my mother-in-law!”
Jinks – “She meant a good deal to you?”
Binks – “Yes; she was a vegetarian, and gave us her meat-card.”
VERY LADYLIKE
This story is from London: A young woman in khaki uniform and cap met a Scotch kilty. She saluted. He curtsied.
HE DROPS INTO POETRY
Frank Proudfoot Jarvis has been at the Front with the First Canadian Mounted Rifles for three years, and his sense of humor and the joy of life still survive. In a letter dated, “Somewhere in Mud, 17th of Ireland,” he writes to his brother, Paul Jarvis, of New York:
“Dear Old Top:
“I had expected to be in gay (?) Paree on furlough at this time, swinging down the Boys de Belogne with girls de Belogne on each arm, but this is postponed till April. The papers say that von Hindy has ordered dinner for himself and the Crown Prince on April Fools’ day, and, if we meet, there will be a sound of deviltry by night and a Waterloo that will cause the princelet to wireless his dad:
“‘Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these, we’re ”soaked“ again.’
“However that may be, here I am sitting in a shed, with a sheepskin over my shoulders, looking like a lady – but not smelling like one. Fritz is acting rather nasty, sending us his R. S. V. P.’s by the air-line, and we reply P. D. Q., and the ‘wake’ is a howling success as the big bulls and the little terriers ‘barcarole.’ And speaking of wakes, I was awake myself the other night in my hut and the Gothas were whirring overhead and Fritz pulling the string every now and then. It was pitch-dark and a big Bertha had just shaken all creation, when I overheard two ‘blimeys’ fanning buckwheat while they hunted a shell-hole.
“‘Where are yer, Bill?’ asked one.
“I’m ’ere,’ says Bill.
“‘Where’s ’ere?’ says his pal.
“‘Ow the blinkin’ ’ell do I know where ’ere is?’ says Bill.
“Just then Fritz put one alongside of my hut and snuffed out all the candles, but thanks to the good old soft mud – and how we have cussed that mud! – I am writing to you, Old Top, tonight. I expect to be on the hike again in a day or so, I know not where and I do not care. All places look alike to this old kid. They can set me down in a field of mud and inside of forty-eight hours I have got a home fit for a prince, or a ground-hog – sometimes I am living several feet under ground and other times I am living in a tent, a hut, a stable, barn, shed, and, when in luck, in some deserted chateau.”
Jarvis, lying on his back looking up at a twinkling star through a hole in the roof seems to have started a train of verse in his brain, for he writes:
“I got to cogitating about a lot of things, and for the first time in my life I found rimes running through what I am pleased to call my mind. So, I lighted my dip and jotted down the enclosed doggerel. They say it is a bad sign when a man starts to write poetry, but I don’t for a moment think anyone would call this by that name or that I shall even be acclaimed a Backyard Kipling. Besides, as I flourish under the sobriquet ‘Bully Beef,’ owing to my major-general proportions, I am certainly no Longfellow. But here it is, such as it is:
I’ve slept in cradles,
I’ve slept in arms,
I was a baby then —
Unconscious of war’s alarms.
I’ve slept on the prairie
Shooting the duck and the goose,
I’ve slept in the bush
Hunting the elk and the moose.
I’ve slept on steamboats
With my bed on the deck,
And I’ve slept in church
With a kink in my neck.
I’ve slept in fields,
Under the stars,
And I’ve slept on trains
In old box cars.
I’ve slept in beds
Of purple and gold,
I’ve slept out in Flanders
In the mud and the cold.
I’ve slept in dugouts
With the rat and the louse,
And I’ve slept in France
In a fairly good house.
I’ve slept in barns
On beds of straw,
I’ve slept in sheds
Wi nae bed at a’.
I’m sleeping now
On a stretcher of wire,
And I pray my last sleep
Will be near a fire.
I’m tired of the wet,
The mud, and the cold,
And I won’t be sorry
When I sleep in the Fold.
THIS PLEASED THE COLONEL
The sergeant halted the new sentry opposite the man he was to relieve.
“Give over your orders,” he said.
The old sentry reeled off the routine instructions with confidence, but one of the special orders baffled him.
“Come
