(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Recent developments have given an unexpectedly topical interest to a new book by Professor Paul Miliukov, L.L.D., entitled Bolshevism: an International Danger (Allen and Unwin). The whole question of the de facto Government of Russia is so fiercely controversial that it is not to be expected that such a work should escape violent criticism from those for whom that Government can do no wrong, though the writer justly claims that (however obvious his own views) he has striven to be strictly fair to those of the enemy. The scheme of his work has been "to trace the evolution of Bolshevism from an abstract doctrine to a practical experiment." One may excusably find the history a grim and menacing one. In the course of it Professor Miliukov tells again the tragedy of the great betrayal (which it will do no one harm to ponder upon just now), when the Commander of the 1st corps of the Siberian Army reported: "A brilliant success crowned our efforts ... there remained before us only a few fortifications, and the battle might soon have taken the character of a complete destruction of the enemy." But the work of M. Lenin had been too thorough; instead of a victory that might have ended the War and saved thousands of lives, we saw this already triumphant army, equipped through British industry, melt into a disorganised rabble. Nor is the writer less interesting on other aspects of his theme; in particular an exposition of the notorious Third International and a survey of the present-moment activities of Bolshevist propaganda, notably in our own country. No one who wishes to read and keep for reference a clearly written and understandable survey of the most urgent problem in modern politics need go further than this short but highly concentrated study.
The March to Paris and the Battle of the Marne, 1914 (Arnold), by Generaloberst Alexander Von Kluck, is more of a soldiers', indeed a staff-officers', book than any that has appeared here from the other side. It deals exclusively with the operations of the German right wing, Von Kluck's own (first) army and his liaison with the second (Von Bülow's), during the move forward to the Grand Morin, the allied counter-offensive and the establishment of the line of the Aisne—that is from the twelfth of August to the twelfth of September. The principal army orders are given textually. An admirable map illustrates each day's routes and billets for his first line and second line troops, his cavalry and the extreme right of the second army. Von Kluck's explanation of his breach of the Supreme Command's orders and the manœuvre which exposed him to Manoury's stroke was that, while ignoring the letter, he was acting in the spirit of those orders on the information available; that a pause to fulfil them literally would have given the enemy time to recover; that defective intelligence kept him ignorant of the fact that the German left and centre had been definitely held by the French (if he had known this he would not, he says, have crossed the Marne). An examination of the frontispiece portrait suggests that this fighting General would easily find excellent reason for disobeying other people's orders and maintain an obstinate defence of his own decisions once made, however disastrous in result. Notes by the historical section (military branch) of the Committee of Imperial Defence point out inaccuracies and contradictions which the lay reader would be unlikely to discover for himself. He will however, if I mistake not, appreciate a soldierly narrative, unspoiled by "political" parentheses or underestimation of opponents, of what was undoubtedly a great military feat. The German right wing covered the most ground and met perhaps the toughest of the fighting.
I have found in Lighting-up Time (Cobden-Sanderson) that all too rare thing, a theatrical novel of which the vitality does not expire towards the end of the fourth chapter. Obviously Mr. Ivor Brown knows the life of modern stageland, one would say, with the intimacy of personal experience. More important still, he commands an easy style and a flow of genial, not too esoteric, humour that combine to keep the reader chuckling and curious to the last page. His title is characteristic, Lighting-up Time symbolising here that period in the career of an actress when her possibly waning attractions need the illumination of a judicious boom. The two main characters are Mary Maroon, the leading lady, and Peter Penruddock, the astute publicity agent who engages to set her upon her financial and artistic pedestal. Peter, in other words, is Mary's tide, taken at the flood in chapter one, and leading her, very divertingly, on to fortune. Both the tour of Stolen or Strayed and the company that present it are admirably true to life, while Mr. Brown has even been able convincingly to suggest the atmosphere of theatrical Oxford, when in due course his mummers descend upon that home of lost comedies and impossible revues. If I have a complaint against the book it is that a tale of such pleasant irony hardly needed the general pairing-off with which the author rings down his curtain; but for this Noah's Ark I should have more easily believed in a story that entertained me throughout.
There are some forty-odd bits in A Bit at a Time (Mills and Boon), and they embrace a variety of subjects, ranging from crocuses in Kensington Gardens to corpse-boats on the Tigris. They are all, whether sentimental, satirical or pathetic, fiction of the lightest type. Such literature was eminently readable during the War—most of Mr. Dion Clayton Calthrop's bits have to do with somebody's "bit"—when a touch of conventional pathos and pretended cynicism and a generous padding of humour, real or forced, provided sufficient relaxation from the strain of anxious hours. But the wisdom of republishing them in book form in these sober days of peace is open to question. When Mr. Calthrop talks satirically of "perfect officials" or of an earnest young American aviator who writes letters home in a United States dialect that was never heard on land or sea outside Bayswater, or of the war-time adventures of one Mr. Mason, skipper, and Mr. Smith, his mate, he is tolerably amusing. When he becomes serious, as in "The Prayer of the Classical Parson" and "When the Son Came Home," his limitations become increasingly apparent. Yet it is in this vein that he gives us what is by all odds his best bit, "The Chevalier of Carnaby Row." When he writes of Cupids and fauns and Columbines and rose-leaves and the sort of young females that find this environment congenial (in books) I like Mr. Calthrop least. Perhaps it is because the publishers have put his picture on the paper cover. He looks much too stalwart and sophisticated to be toying with such gossamer fantasies.