During the Great War lots of young men, away from home for the first time, cultivated their first moustaches. It was a fashionable thing to do (and for British officers it was even compulsory, until 1916).
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One hundred years ago this week "Clio" of Melbourne's Punch asked: "Could anything be more awful than to kiss the wrong man?
"This is what one of the shyest, most blushful of little maids imagined for a few dreadful minutes she had done the other night.
"Her fiance, a soldier, had been away at training camp for some weeks. At last he was coming down to Melbourne on weekend leave, and his arrival out at the home of his excited little fiancee was timed to the minute. She was ready on the watch for her hero, waiting in the garden.
"At the click of the gate out she rushed, flung herself into the arms of the khaki figure who stepped forward out of the darkness, and kissed him. Then, before the astonished young man had time to speak she gasped out a shriek of horror, and rushed into the house, exclaiming to an alarmed sister that she had just kissed a strange man – a man with a moustache!
"When the abashed soldier entered the house he explained that his very modest little lip ornament had been nurtured during the last few weeks.
"It was such a half-grown little bristle display but oh! The strange, unfamiliar, terrible prickle of it to a modest maid in a dark garden!"
