Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 152, June 27, 1917: 1917 Almanack

June 1917. The Great War grinds through its third apocalyptic year, and Punch, the bible of British wit, fires its satirical broadsides at a nation being remade by blood and necessity. This issue includes the 1917 Almanack, that cherished annual tradition where the magazine's writers gaze into their crystal ball and predict the year ahead with magnificent, deliberate wrongness. Here you'll find sharp little poems about soldiers on leave, sketches mocking the theatrical pretensions of film actors, and sly observations about women learning to fill men's roles while the boys in the trenches grow up or don't come home at all. The humor is unmistakably of its moment - that particular British talent for laughing at the unthinkable - but it also captures something universal: a society trying to hold itself together through levity when the ground keeps shifting beneath it. Not a dry historical artifact, but a living document of how wit became wartime armor.