Sergeant. "Keep yer dressin' by the left there! Blimey! you don't want N.C.O.'s—what you want is a bloomin' sheep-dog!"
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I never open a book by Mr. Robert Halifax without a feeling of pleasant anticipation, nor close one without a sense of quickened sympathy for my fellow-mortals, especially those of them who dwell in Camden Town. His latest story, The Right to Love (Methuen), finds him again on familiar ground; but the inhabitants of Widdiford Street have all the freshness of real human beings. Perhaps more than its predecessors The Right to Love is a story with a purpose and a moral; in it Mr. Halifax has illustrated by two groups of characters the vexed question of marriage failures and the hard lot of the unwanted woman. But do not suppose that these characters are merely "cases." On the contrary, it is because they are realized as understandable creations of flesh and blood that the disasters of Norah and Tom Spain and the tragedy of Letty Summerbee's enforced spinsterhood move one to so personal a concern. From the moment when Norah and Tom enter their little house after the short honeymoon to that in which the tormented young wife finally leaves her worthless husband for the protection (word rightly used) of his long-suffering friend one is made to feel that exactly thus and thus the affair happened, and is happening to like persons every day. As for Letty, with her restraint, her practical helpfulness and her occasional outbursts of emotion thwarted and suppressed, she is a type only too convincing. Perhaps one might object that Mr. Halifax brings an indictment against society without suggesting any practical remedy. Also that—as I have noticed before—his humorous characters have a tendency to edge away from the rest into the regions of farce. But for all that The Right to Love remains a simple, sincere and very moving study.
I like the remark that General Joffre made, not to the horse-marines, but to the remnants of the six thousand Fusiliers Marins who made up the Naval Brigade at Dixmude in November, 1914. "You are my best infantrymen," he told them; and, if you want to know why, all you have to do is read Dixmude (Heinemann), by Charles le Goffic. For four weeks, shrapnel to right of them, "saucepans" to left of them, volleyed and thundered, and for four weeks the six thousand stood in the valley of death at Dixmude and held up six times as many Boches, who came on, as one of them said, like bugs. Forty thousand was the estimate of the number of these marines formed by a German major who was one of their prisoners; when he learnt that they were only six he wept with rage and muttered, "Ah, if we had only known!" Dixmude was not quite such a big affair as Verdun, but the men who held the town, "the young ladies with the red pompoms" on their caps, were first cousins to our own Jack Tars. Bretons or Britons, there is nothing to choose between them. Sailors all, they are the salt of the sea; and this fascinating and circumstantial epic of the French marines is not at all an exaggerated picture of the cheery courage and endurance of the Breton fisherman.