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Show WAR OFFICE FEARSOME PLACE According to Captain Bairnsf ather, British Institution Is Designed to Be an Annoyance. I have not been to the British war office very often, writes Capt. Bruce Bairnsfather in "From Mud to Mufti," but I have never lost the odd sensation sensa-tion that It gives rise to. You enter the building and fill out a form. In time a Boer war veteran tells you boisterously bois-terously to "follow the girl." The girl, a guide of sorts In an engineer's dark brown overall, sets off sullenly down a cement passage, with a group of assorted as-sorted officers pursuing. She, I fancy, revels in the intricacies of those catacombs. cata-combs. Having apparently described a complete com-plete parallelogram In a forbidding-looking forbidding-looking corridor, you suddenly como upon a lift. It is always disappearing upward when you arrive. It comes down suddenly and disgorges an assorted as-sorted crowd ; headed by the girl guide, you enter and are taken up. We all repeat the corridor-and-parallelc-gram business. Nothing but the girl guide can save you now. Lost in the war office ! How awful that would be I I can imagine how i visitor who' had lagged behind the ' guide would stop, suddenly realizing that he was lost; how he would vainly beut on those stone walls and scream for help ; how a typist would find his skeleton weeks later In an attitude that evidently showed that he had succumbed suc-cumbed while endeavoring to gnaw his way through a door. I followed the guide and, after being nanded to several officials, at last came up with the official whose duty it was to prevent, If possible, anyone from seeing the officer who had summoned sum-moned me by letter. Youth's Companion. |