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Should we succeed in conveying this dream, the world is ours.
    One way we might do this is atdrinking establishments. We might consider dressing comely young women in fetching uniforms, and have them pass among the clientele, carrying trays full of cigarettes. These sirens, or “cigarette girls,” as we shall call them, would carry their trays in front of them, just below their admirable bosoms. This guarantees that men would at least look at their wares. A certain amount of decolletage might be added, to further entice…
     

    Gibson Girl –
Inspiration for
Augustus?

A Lucifer to Light Your Fag
     
    When the Great War broke out, Augustus recognized it not only as a time of world upheaval, but also a time of business opportunity.
    By 1917, American doughboys were encouraged to pack up their old kit bags with General Snuffs new brand of cigarettes,
Lady Fantasy
. Each enameled tin of cigarettes displayed a pouting, handsome lady with auburn hair, gray eyes and rather misty features. There was nothing indefinite, however, about her well-filled shirt-waist. Augustus had insisted on the substantial bosom. “Our boys are far from home,” he wrote to the advertising artist. “They want their girl, they want their mother, they want something to suck on. Let us push it at them.”
    Lady Fantasy cigarettes became so popular that the slogan on each pack – “Fragrant and Graceful”, abbreviated F.A.G. – gave rise to “fag”, the First World War nickname for a cigarette. (In the same way, “Lucifer” brand matches – a company which General Snuff tried to acquire – became the nickname for all matches. Both names appeared in the popular song of the time:
    Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag
    And smile, smile, smile
    Long as there’s a lucifer to light your fag
    Then smile, ‘cause it’s the style
     
    But General Snuff found a way to make the government help with its advertising. Lady Fantasy and her bosom were to become ever more prominent as the war continued.
    A patriotic poster of 1918 was not, strictly speaking, an advertisement for General Snuff. Instead, it purported to sell War Bonds. The tobacco giant had generously devised this patriotic poster and printed thousands of copies at company expense, volunteering to place them in rail-road stations across the land. The War Department, in gratitude, promised to look into larger orders for General Snuff and Tobacco products.
    The poster shows an officer in his tent at night, somewhere in France. The orange candle-light gleams on his hair and the cleft in his chin, as he leans back from the letter he is writing to take a pull at his cigarette. On the table before him, along with his pen, the unfinished letter, and his Bible, there stands a prominent tin of Lady Fantasy cigarettes. The smoke rises from his cigarette and curls back to form a cool blue cloud above his head. This cloud contains a vision of home: a cool summer evening, magnolias around the porch, and a lovely woman inshirtwaist reclining across a white porch swing. The slogan reads:
    I S S HE B UYING B ONDS F OR M E ?
     
    Notice that the product is never mentioned. Yet the woman in the dream is of course Lady Fantasy herself, with her auburn hair, mist-gray eyes, not to forget the fantastic bosom. Thus the company contrived not only to hammer home its message without a word, it managed to link the product to patriotism.
    But there was even more to the Lady Fantasy campaign. In every tin of cigarettes that went overseas, General Snuff included a trading card showing the same romantic picture as the poster. But here the message was addressed to the troops themselves, using a slightly different slogan:
    I S S HE W AITING F OR M E ?
     
    A reassuring subhead added,
“You can always count on Lady Fantasy.”
    It might have been a great and wonderful campaign. The poster Lady Fantasy might have become more famous than the finger-pointing Uncle Sam. But alas, the war came to an end. As Augustus wrote