OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
In Hearts of Alsace (Smith, Elder) your interest will be held less by the actual story than by the profoundly moving and poignant picture that Miss Betham-Edwards has drawn of life in the Reichsland under the increasing burden of Prussian tyranny. It is a picture that one feels to be absolutely true. The author writes of what she knows. This Alsatian family—old Jean Barthélemy, the city father, crushed and embittered by the fate of his loved Mulhouse; his two daughters and the circle of their friends within the town—all live and move and look longingly towards the West, as so many others must have done these forty and odd years past. The plot, what there is of it, concerns the clandestine love of Claire, the petted younger daughter of the Gley house, for an officer in the conqueror's host, whom she had met during a visit to Strasburg. Claire marries her Kurt, a shady worthless knave, and, as the book ends with the outbreak of war, is left to an unknown fate. Very stirring are the chapters that tell of the tumult of emotion that broke loose when the French guns were heard in Mulhouse; though here—as in all those war stories whose only satisfactory end is the final confusion of Kaiserdom—one feels that there is a chapter yet to be added. Miss Betham-Edwards writes with all the vigour (I might add all the garrulity) of intense personal feeling. Her book, as a race study, is a real contribution to the literature of the War.
These are days in which some measure of sacrifice is rightly considered the common duty of everyone, so long as it is sacrifice with an object. Perhaps this consideration gives me less patience with the preposterous kind, which, as a motive in fiction, usually consists in the hero inviting all and sundry to trample upon his prospects and reputation. This is what the chief character in Proud Peter (Hutchinson) did. He began by allowing it to be supposed that he was the father of his brother's illegitimate child, the bright peculiar fatuousness of which pretence was that thereby the said brother was enabled to marry, and break the heart of, the heroine, whom, of course, Peter himself adored. Also, many years after, when the child, now an objectionable young man, nay more, an actor, was pursuing another heroine with his unwelcome attentions, he very nearly spiked Peter's guns, on being threatened, by exclaiming, "I am thy son"—or words to that effect. Fortunately, however, there existed, as I had somehow known would be the case, a signed photograph that put all that right. Why, I wonder, is Mr. W. E. Norris always so sharp with the dramatic profession? Was it not in one of his earlier stories that somebody quite seriously questions whether a good actor can also be a good man? On the whole, as you may have gathered, while I should call Proud Peter a comfortable tale of the eupeptic type, I enjoyed it rather less than other stories from the same facile pen.
Arthur Green's The Story of a Prisoner of War (Chatto and Windus) can be recommended to all who can still digest the uncooked facts. "I can swear," he says, "that all that is written is Gospel truth," but without any such assurance it would be impossible for even the most sceptical to doubt the writer's honesty. Wounded and taken prisoner in August, 1914, he suffered severely at the hands of the Germans, and his account of the camp at Wittenburg does nothing to decrease one's loathing for that pestilential spot. For many reasons it gives that a civilized race can sink to such depths of cruelty and cowardice. Perhaps the only people to whom it will give any comfort are those who have sent food and clothing to our prisoners. But I am glad that this book came my way, because I would choose to read facts of the War baldly written by a soldier rather than any war fiction composed by imaginative civilians. "Of course I'm not an author," he writes, and as far as grammar and spelling go it is not for me to contradict him, but he has seen and suffered, and in these days no one who has handled a bayonet need apologise for taking a turn with a pen.
Encouraged, no doubt, by the reception accorded to that cheery little volume, Minor Horrors of War, its author, Dr. A. E. Shipley, has now followed it with an equally entertaining sequel in More Minor Horrors (Smith, Elder). This deals more especially with the pests attached to the Senior Service, and familiar to those who go down to the sea in ships—the Cockroach, the Mosquito, the Rat, the Biscuit-Weevil and others. Of each Dr. Shipley has some pleasant word of instruction or comment to say, in his own highly entertaining manner. I like, for example, his remark about the mosquito (whose infinite variety is recognised in no fewer than five chapters), that, if he could talk, the burden of his song would be that of the guests at the dinner-party in David Copperfield—"Give us blood!" And I found good omen in the cockroach world on learning that Periplaneta Orientalis, or the common English sort, has P. Germanica thoroughly beat in the matter of empire-building. In short, Dr. Shipley's second volume, like his first, combines instruction with amusement, and is well worth its modest eighteen-pence to those on land who may wish to learn about the intimate associates of their dear ones who are defending them upon the sea.
"In the Midst of Life——"
"Good Greengrocer and Mixed Business, sure living; death cause of leaving."—Provincial Paper.
The Author (dictating). "'The room was filled with dynamite, gun-cotton, nitro-glycerine, cans of petrol and other high explosives. A train of powder had been laid and was swiftly burning its way to the heap of combustibles. Clarence, tied to a post, listened to the retreating footsteps of the Huns, a smile of contempt curling his sensitive nostrils.' Clarence is in a tight place, Miss Brown, and I don't know yet how we'll get him out of it. Can you suggest anything?"
Amanuensis (brightly). "Why not have peace proclaimed?"