“The Good Soldier”: A Selection of Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-1917
With Comment by N. P. DAWSON
Cloth, $1.25
Mrs. Dawson has made an admirable selection of soldiers’ letters, some of them written to mothers, others to sweethearts, sisters and friends. It is an interesting and appealing book, and gives a more intimate picture of the soldier than can be gained from almost any other single volume.
“Here are boys,” writes the editor in her Introduction to this collection, “all sorts of boys: French, English, Italian, American; young artists, budding novelists and poets; musicians; drab and spectacled London office clerks just off a stool; an auctioneer from Brixton; elderly married men as old as thirty-five and ‘little nephews’ of sixteen; Catholics, Protestants, Christians, Jews; grave young students in arms; Crusaders of France; Oxford and Cambridge men and French school boys; American college men and American rich men’s sons from New York and California....
“As one reads these letters written home, one finds that he does not think of them as letters at all but as boys: Enzo, Antonio, Robert, Arthur, Gaston, William, Marcel, Harry, Victor. And one is filled with pity that they are boys—‘mere men,’ as more than one of them says, pitted against professional soldiers, experts in the refined arts of modern war. But if one thing more than another is revealed in the letters, it is that the writers do not want to be pitied, rather envied. All express in one way or another that death has no terrors for ‘the good soldier.’”
“In such a collection ... the letters themselves are their own best comment. A mere reviewer has no place with these offerings.... They are such important matters as history leaves out, but hearts remember.”—N. Y. World.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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