Arthur Stanwood Pier is a distinguished writer of stories for young people and since 1896 one of the editors of The Youth’s Companion. Among Mr. Pier’s books are The Boys of St. Timothy, The Jester of St. Timothy, Grannis of the Fifth, Jerry, The Plattsburgers, The Pedagogues, and The Women We Marry. In A Night Attack we are given a vivid picture of the life of the soldier in training and of the sympathetic relations of officers and men.
Mary Brecht Pulver has in The Path of Glory written one of the finest stories of the war. The manner in which a poor and humble family of mountaineers secured distinction and very real happiness, though it was tinged with sadness, makes a story of gripping interest and one that cannot fail to make every reader kinder and more humane in his intercourse with those less favored than himself.
Fisher Ames, Jr., is a well-known author of stories for boys. Mr. Ames has been appointed the official historian of the Red Cross Society and has gone to Europe (1918) as a commissioned officer in the United States Army.
In Sergt. Warren Comes Back from France the author makes us see very clearly the heroic figure of the blind soldier, and we realize that under the spell of such a personality the voters would unanimously decide to spend their money in France and relinquish the idea of making their town more beautiful. In the words of one of the villagers, “Sergt. Warren can see straight even if he is blind,” and the crowd will always respond to such leadership.
Arthur Guy Empey is an American and a soldier of the Great War, who after a life at the Front in which he did all that a brave man can do for the cause of humanity and survive, has written of some of his adventures in Over the Top, one of the best-known books of the war. In the chapter which we have called “The Coward” he shows the splendid regeneration of a despicable man.
The “hero” in this story is an Englishman, as Mr. Empey fought in the British army before America entered the war, but the phase of human nature portrayed in “The Coward” must have been observable in all the belligerent armies.