OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
In The Irish on the Somme (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) Mr. MICHAEL MACDONAGH continues the story which he began in The Irish at the Front. He gives us more accounts of the heroism of his fellow-countrymen in the titanic battles that have thrilled the minds of men all the world over. He writes with a justifiable enthusiasm of the deeds of these gallant Irishmen. The book stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet. In a war which has produced so many glorious actions the Irish are second to none. Even those who do not agree in every point with Mr. JOHN REDMOND will admit ungrudgingly that he makes good the claims he puts forward in his introduction to Mr. MACDONAGH'S book. He tells us that from Ireland 173,772 Irishmen are serving in the Army and Navy, and that in addition at least 150,000 of the Irish race have joined the colours in Great Britain—no mean record. Mr. MACDONAGH is as proud of the glory of the Ulstermen as of that of Nationalist Ireland. He dedicates his book to the carum caput of Major WILLIE REDMOND.
Mr. E.B. OSBORN, who has written The Maid with Wings, and other Fantasies Grave to Gay (LANE), will perhaps not altogether thank me for saving that among the Other Fantasies I throughout preferred the grave to the gay. The Maid with Wings itself is a beautiful little piece of imagination—the vision of the Maid of France comforting an English boy during his last moments out in No Man's Land. The thing is well and delicately done, with a reserve that may encourage the judicious to hope for good work in the future from a pen that is (I fancy) as yet somewhat new. On the other hand, I must confess that the Gaiety left me (though this, of course, may be an isolated experience) with sides unshaken. "Callisthenes at Cambridge," for example, is but little removed from the article that, to my certain knowledge, has padded school and 'Varsity magazines since such began to be. Still, I liked the plea for Protection against foreign imports in literature and art by way of helping the native producer, though even here some condensation would, I thought, have sharpened the point. But, after all, reviewers are dull dogs to move to laughter (as no doubt Mr. OSBORN will now agree), so I hope he will rest content with my genuine appreciation of his graver passages, and will be encouraged to give us something more ambitious and less open to the suspicion of book-making.
The Letters of a Soldier: 1914-1915 (CONSTABLE) are letters to a mother; letters also of an artist, and full of an exquisite sensibility, a fine candour. I can best give you an impression of the charming personality of this young French soldier (who survived his first great battle, to be reported missing after the counter-attack, since when no news of him has reached his friends), by quoting little sentences of his, and if you don't want to know more of him after reading them then nothing I can say will be of any use: "The true death would be to live in a conquered country, above all for me, whose art would perish ... If you could only see the confidence of the little forest animals, such as the field-mice! They were as pretty as a Japanese print, with the inside of their ears like a rosy shell ... How is it possible to think of Schumann as a barbarian?... I am happy to have felt myself responsive to all these blows, and my hope lies in the thought that they will have forged my soul ... Spinoza is a most valuable aid in the trenches ... We are in billets after the great battle, and this time I saw it all. I did my duty; I knew that by the feeling of my men for me. But the best are dead. We gained our object ... I send you my whole love. Whatever comes to pass, life has had its beauty." And then no more.
If Mr. HAROLD LAKE'S account of the British forces in Macedonia is supposed to supply an answer to a not unnatural query as to what they are doing there, I am afraid one must take it that in fact they are doing nothing in particular. An intelligent British public believes that at least they are immobilising important enemy forces and perhaps accomplishing several other useful things as well, but the writer, who has actually been In Salonica with Our Army (MELROSE), frankly lays aside high considerations of policy and, seeing it all in desperately foreshortened perspective, knows only that he and his fellows, having volunteered to fight, are being called on instead to endure a purgatorial routine of dust and dulness, mosquitoes, malaria and night marches, and the grilling away of useless days in the society of flies and lizards, with only, as a very occasional treat, the smallest glimpse of anything resembling a Front. And all this is in a country so desolated by centuries of war that in spite of obvious natural fertility it is a sullen treeless desert—a desert of blight and thistles, as profitless to our men as their periodically deferred anticipations of a grand advance. A book that sets out to record vacuity can hardly be crammed with thrilling literature, and I am not going to pretend that Mr. LAKE has achieved the impossible. All the same one found points—for instance, his desire that someone (apparently England for choice!) should colonise Macedonia; and his most right and appropriate plea for fairer recognition of those who have sacrificed their health in the national service. A man, he holds, who is to suffer all his life from malarial fever has done his bit no less than plenty who bear the honourable insignia of the wounded in battle and the snout of a mosquito may be as valorously encountered as the bayonet of a Hun. And so say all of us.
I can read Miss MARY WEBB'S studies of the peasant mind with great pleasure, but at the same time I am doubtful whether she is as successful in Gone to Earth (CONSTABLE) as she was in her first novel, The Golden Arrow. My difficulty—and I hope it will not be yours—was to believe in the power of Hazel Woodus to make very dissimilar men lose their hearts and heads. That Jack Reddin, a dare-devil farmer with love for any sort of a chase in his blood, should pursue her to the bitter end is intelligible enough, but why Edward Marston, a rather anæmic minister, married her and then forgave her escapades with Reddin has me bothered. I can admire Edward's forgiving spirit, but cannot altogether pity him when his methodical congregation said straight and disagreeable things. In fact my total inability to see Hazel as Edward saw her somewhat detracted from my enjoyment of her history. That being said the rest is, thank goodness, praise. Miss WEBB is a careful and sincere workman, who, whether you believe or disbelieve in her characters, writes with such real compassion for suffering that she cannot fail to enlist your sympathy. Additionally her vein is original, and she only needs a little more experience to make a great success of it.
Presumably the eleven stories in The Loosing of the Lion's Whelps (MILLS AND BOON) are published for the first time, as we are not given any notice to the contrary, and I can imagine that Mr. JOHN OXENHAM'S many admirers will derive considerable pleasure from them. Mr. OXENHAM'S weak points are that sometimes he fails to distinguish between real pathos and sticky sentimentality, and that when he tries his hand at telling a practical joke he does not know when to stop. There are, however, stories in this volume which deserve unqualified praise. The shortest, "How Half a Man Died," is the best; indeed, it is a real gem. But "The Missing K.C.'s" has a genuine thrill in it; and, in a very different manner, "A By-Product" is proof enough that the author can get his effects all the more readily when he keeps his own feelings under the strictest control. Mr. OXENHAM'S XI. has weak points in it, but on the whole it is a good side.
