"To say that this book is remarkable is only to lay hold on a convenient word as expressive of at least a part of the sensation the story produces. Here is a book for which many of us have dimly waited; a book that transcends the outer facts and reveals the inner significance of war. The Dark Forest is a love story of unusual beauty, as well as a story of war. Who, having read it, will forget this book; at once awful and beautiful? It must be read, for neither quotation nor description is capable of giving more than a bare hint of the nobleness, the intensity of this work of art so deeply rooted in reality."--New York Times.
"Of all the novels that have come out of European battlefields there is probably none of such scope, such penetrating analysis and such completely spiritual quality as Hugh Walpole's Dark Forest. It is many novels in one.... It is instinct with the sense of spiritual adventure. It is young, finely emotional, stamped with the consciousness of beauty and infinity, of heroism and horror, love of life and the vision of death."--Eleanore Kellogg, in The Chicago Evening Post.
"At last there issues a novel with qualities of greatness and the promise of endurance. Hugh Walpole's Dark Forest should, indeed, as a work of literary art, easily survive the terror and the turmoil."--New York World.
"Dostoievsky compressed within a few pages. A remarkable book indeed--beyond doubt the most notable novel inspired by the war."--New York Tribune.
"The Dark Forest is the first fine story product of a high order of creative art we have had from the European war."--Boston Herald.
"The very spirit of Russia is here. This is unusual. Walpole appears to have become gifted in a few months with the true Russian literary method. Its magic is his."--Boston Transcript.
"It is a story of sustained power; tragic import and impress, and careless disregard of western conventions. The rapt mysticism and unselfish devotion of the heroine; the downright, uncompromising materialism of her Russian lovers; the pathetic appeal of Trenchard's loyalty, and the situation finally developed by the heroine's untimely taking off--these, in connection with the continually recurring episodes of grim war, afford large opportunity for originality of treatment and characteristic, forceful dramatism."--Philadelphia North American.
"Such a novel needed the war for its background. It needed the war for its origin. It could only have been planned on the battle line. It could be written for and appreciated by only such an audience as has been prepared by the melancholy of catastrophe. War's blood is in it, war's nerves and sinews. It is the very soul, upheaved, bereft, of war. It is the one great romance that has come from a world of armies."--New York Evening Sun.
"The Dark Forest is a novel of extraordinary beauty and power.... It is a work of art, unqualifiedly a great book."--Review of Reviews.
"Hugh Walpole's The Dark Forest is the best story yet written about the war that we have read."--New York Globe.