‘COMPLICATED CAMOUFLAGE.’

TOMMIES’ PANTOMIME IN ITALY

From G. Ward Price. War Correspondents’ Headquarters, Italy, Saturday.

Hard work and good play go together even in armies, and one of the British divisions that had the severest fighting in France has thrown itself with equal energy here into the task of organising a pantomime to amuse the battalions as they come back from the line. It is a very comical pantomime with one of the best comedians of the North of England in the chief role, and a girl of that remarkable gracefulness and beauty which the British Army seems to be able to evolve anywhere and at the shortest notice. There is an Italian ladies’ outfitting shop in a town some way back that has never yet been able to understand the strange customer who presented himself there a fortnight ago in the form of a sturdy sapper, bringing a note from an officer to the effect that he was to be measured for corsets and provided with a complete outfit of feminine vanities, expense being no object. “Strange, ingenious English!” murmured the benign manageress in her soft Venetian dialect, as this modest young man packed his load of fragile boxes into a rumbling motor-lorry and departed. “Doubtless they are planning some great coup of complicated camouflage.” Another event which I attended yesterday was an “Entente musicale”. An English division invited the French to join in a composite concert. To make fraternisation among the guests certain, the troops of the two armies were made to set to partners outside the building, each British private, sapper, or gunner being paired off with an opposite number among the Frenchmen.