IN the club to which I have the honor to belong and in which I pass the few leisure moments that fall to my lot (not more than four or five hours a day in these sad times), there are certain persons who seem to me so typical and representative that I feel they must be found wherever men are gathered together to discuss the progress of the war, in clubs, from Halifax to Los Angeles.

First and foremost there is Mr. Albert Downandout, our club strategist. He is to be found at any hour in the afternoon, resting his two hundred and fifty pounds, avoirdupois, in an armchair in the lounge room.

His specialty is explaining the strategic errors of the Allies. If he had his rights—that is to say, if our government was conducted with the faintest pretense of efficiency and organization —he would be advising, or better still, commanding Sir Douglas Haig and General Pershing.

As it is, he spends his time explaining the absurd blunders of our Allied generals by means of burnt matches, cocktail glasses, olive stones and the other munitions of war to be found on the table of a club sitting room.

"Here," he says, "is Verdun," and he plants his glass of whiskey and soda firmly in the middle of the table. Then he shows us our errors, one after the other, pitilessly; he divides them into the first great error, the second great error, the third great error, and so forth. Any one of these might have been avoided.

In fact Mr. Downandout shows us just what Napoleon (or himself) would have done in each case. The situation, it appears, is now hopeless. The Germans are entrenched behind sixty miles of barbed wire. They have dug themselves in, sixty feet below ground. Down there they have made comfortable rooms, restaurants, barber shops and concert halls.

In fact they can be heard playing Wagner's music down there, while our men freeze up on top. If they refuse to come up, as they probably will, we have no way of forcing them to the top.

All of this for lack of a little strategy. Indeed the war on the Allied side has been one long record of failure.

While Mr. Downandout talks, the cocktails and other supplies are brought to him by a waiter with a wooden foot, who came back maimed from Gallipoli.

I notice that he listens to Mr. Downandout with a peculiar interest. Sometimes there passes over his face something as near to contempt as the face of a club waiter is permitted to reveal.

NOT far away in the lounge room of the club there may be seen, every day, at any time after banking hours, our Chief Financial Authority—Mr. Sertin Blooruin.

It is his business in life to explain that England, France and Italy are virtually bankrupt. The Bank of England, he says, will soon close its doors. The lira has fallen never to rise again. The Liberty Loans will never be repaid. The Russian rouble is dead.

The trade of the United States with Paraguay is extinct. The Germans are already prepared to capture the wholesale commerce of Siam immediately after the war.

In fact it appears that there are German agents in Bangkok today (not yesterday, but today) buying up the cochineal crop of 1921. The United States, says Mr. Blooruin, will unquestionably be dragged down in the vortex.

The balance of trade will turn upon us and crush us. Labor will rise. Sterling exchange will fall. Real estate will collapse. Credit will explode. The reserve notes will be called in. The militia will be called out. Property will be unsaleable. Money will heap up in the banks with no one to take it out. The banks will burst. The country will be flooded with depreciated money. Confidence will be dried up.

There is in the lower part of the club a hall porter, having at his home four children, who put a hundred dollars into the Liberty Loan.

From what he catches of the conversations of Mr. Blooruin he is glad that, not being a man of means, he can lose all he has without worrying about it.

SIDE by side with Mr. Downandout and Mr. Blooruin one may often see Professor Boras, who holds the chair of mediaeval history in the neighboring university. It is his particular function to enlighten us qn the causes of the war. Till we heard him discuss it we thought that the war was a plain case of decent people' rising up everywhere to fight against tyranny and brutality.

It appears that it is deeper than that. Professor Boras explains that the "rootage" of the war goes back even beyond the Middle Ages. It represents the conflict of the brachycephalic culture of the Wendic races with the dolichocephalic culture of the Alpine stock.

Professor Boras says that this conflict has already lasted two thousand years: he thinks it will continue for ten thousand more. What we are really fighting for, he says, is the dolichocephalic idea.

I noticed that one of our waiters—who had just enlisted in the navy with the idea that he was to fight for the United States—looked very sick at hearing this.

Deep gloom is also spread freely in the club by our talented member, Mr. Vainregret, who claims that we are, as a nation, not organized: that we cannot organize and will not organize. Every German, it seems, is organized from the cradle. It is no use our trying to remedy this. Had we begun fifty years ago something might have been accomplished. It is now too late.

WITH the presence of such members as these, my club, and every other club that is like it, would be a dreary place indeed. Yet the effect of their presence is mitigated by the existence of another member to whose personality before the war we attached but little importance.

Such as, for example, The Cheerful Idiot. He is the butt of the club, too young and too foolish to count for anything. I have heard him remark, when Mr. Downandout, the strategist, said that the Germans were in dug-outs sixty feet deep, that it would be a mighty good time to shovel the earth in on them, eh what? This seemed to strike him as a joke of singular merit.

I have noticed him listen to Mr. Bloorain's talk of the cancellation of debts and observe that this would be a devil of a sell on his poor old tailor, eh?

And once, after Professor Borus had treated us to his familiar discourse, proving that ten thousand years was the period of time which the Germans carried in their heads as the date of the absorption of the entire world into the German Empire, the Cheerful Idiot remarked that it would save the Germans a lot of worry if we knocked the idea out of their heads, for good and all, along about next spring.

These sallies of his own always threw the Cheerful Idiot into fits of laughter, of the kind that, before the war we used to think particularly irritating and over-loud—for the quiet of the club. But, somehow, since the war has been on, the presence of this idiot has been like a streak of sunshine in the gloom.

Indeed we were all sorry when, quite suddenly (and after he had been rejected for six different branches of the U. S. service), he at last palmed himself off on the government, by some form of giddy subterfuge, as an aviator ready for training.

"What on earth do you know about a flying machine?" asked Mr. Downandout, on his cheerful departure.

"Not the first darned thing!" laughed the Idiot, "but I imagine the important thing is to keep going like the devil."

After which he left for Texas.

It has occurred to me that his advice might be useful to a good many of us.