# Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3823/My Brother's Letter

MY BROTHER'S LETTER.
Relations used to be for the most part a bore, and, unless rich, it was well that they were disregarded. But the war has altered all that. The war has broUght relations, no matter how humble, into fashion.
Not all, but some. I have as a matter of fact myself one brother in the Fusiliers, in camp, and another who is a special constable and, three times has reported an airship by telephone; but these do not count. It is fathers, brothers, cousins, sons, uncles and nephews at the Front who count.
Anyone who can refer to a real relation at the Front is just now conversationally on velvet, while, if a letter from this relation can be produced and read, everyone else must give way. Sydney Smiths, Theodore Hooks, Richard Porsons, Thomas Babington Macaulays even, would be three-a-penny to-day as against one obscure individual who happened to have a brother in the trenches and a letter in his hand-writing.
But that is not all. There is reflected glory too. To know a person who has a relation at the Front is to be immeasurably promoted socially, and most of the conversations which one overhears in trains and elsewhere have some such opening as this: "A friend of my brother's has seen a Belgian..." "A cousin of my wife's who is a doctor in a field hospital says..." "I know a man who was talking with a wounded Tommy, and he..." "An undergraduate friend of my boy's who is just back from France..." Once stories begun in this way would empty a room; but not so now. Now they no longer devastate but fascinate. It does not matter what the stories are about, the fact remains that an opening gambit which thme months ago would stamp a man as a triple bore now holds everyone breathless. In short, relations at last have come to their own. Another achievement of William Hohenzollern!
For the most part they bear upon German atrocities, just as a little while ago they were the preliminaries to unmistakable evidence of the presence in this country of thousands of Russians travelling from Scotland to Southampton by underground passage and other mysterious ways. I myself believed in those Russians absolutely, and relinquished them with pain and sorrow; and all because they were attested to by other people's relations. This helps to show what a hold the relation is getting on us. In fact no story of the war is now possible without some kith and kin in it.
Personally I am much out in the cold. Those two brothers I told you of may serve to fill a gap now and then—a gap left by other more entertaining raconteurs—but they are not, as I said, any real good. Both are in England, and one will never leave it. But if things were different... If only that soldier brother had joined earlier and had written to me from Rheims, say, or Compiegne, how my stock would fly up! Or if that other one would even now fling away his truncheon, enlist in time to share the march to Berlin, and then sit down to tell me all about it, what a swell I should become! How dinner-parties would assemble to hear me!
As it is, I have to-day to do the best I can either with the tame home-keeping exploits of these two, or, by listening with excessive sympathy or by other parasitical endeavour, acquire a reversionary interest in someone else's relation's narrative. I have even, in order to cut some sort of a figure in a company where relations were being used with dashing success—I have even gone so far as to appropriate the gardener's boy's uncle, last heard of from Cambrai, as a personal and communicative friend, and claim an intimate association with his letter home.
And how splendid if all that could be changed!
"My brother," I could say boldly and with truth,—"my brother has sent me a few lines from Berlin, the substance of which you might care to hear." Of course they would be falling over each other to hear, but that is my artful way. "He camped out," I should go on, "in the Thiergarten. He says that to see the French waving their arms and cheering on the top of the Brandenburg Gate was one of the finest things possible to imagine. He had one bit of special luck: he was chosen to be one of the guard to protect the removal of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum pictures which are coming to London. He says that among these is the famous portrait of Alexander del Borro (No. 413A) which is among our little lot."
That would be worth living for—the triumph of that relation's letter! It cannot, I fear, be mine; but surely it will be somebody's...