"PLAYIN SOJER"

The game of war has started on Soldiers Field for fair. The work of drill, squads-right and platoons-left-front-into-line-double-time-march has taken second place to the more exacting sport of rushing imaginary trenches under an imaginary "hail of death" (as the war correspondents always describe it). The cinder-heaps are hills, the grass is forests, the fence is a wall of China, and the whole land is "terrain." A man may be a squad, a squad a company, and a company a regiment. In such Lilliputian measure do we play at war, seeing how armies move and battles are won.

To a man gifted with a not-too-complicated sense of humor, there might be enough to stir the ready laugh in the sight of a group of men on the ground jumping up, running forward a few steps, and then making a head-on dive to the ground again, ploughing through the cinders or the mire.

Yet when we know that men in this simple way are learning to save themselves, in so far as they may, from terrible slaughter in battles, and learning that they may teach others to be saved, the game takes on a new meaning. It is not a boys' game played by boys with wooden rifles and paper hats who simulate the excitement of war. It is a man's game, and learning to play it may be worth in time our own poor lives, and the greater success of our cause.

"Play up, and play the game." That is the slogan of sportsmen.