Living Bayonets: A Record of the Last Push (Lane) is a fourth of the enthusiastic and fiery war-books of that eminently enthusiastic and inextinguishably fiery warrior-author, Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson, of the Canadian Field Artillery. If he evinces, blatantly at times, the motives and perspective of the propagandist, he is justified by the fact that he most ardently practised the Hun hatred which he preaches. He states that he enjoyed the dangers and discomforts of so doing, and his assertion is proved to be a true one by his having returned again and again to the fray, notwithstanding every excuse and temptation to leave it. The book follows on after his Khaki Courage, and is also in the form of letters to his people at home. It takes up the narrative at April 14th, 1917, and carries it to the triumphant end. When, by reason of his wounds, he had to leave the Front and work in London and elsewhere, he naturally lost touch with the real business of the battle; even after his return to the Front in April, 1918, his letters lack their original sense of actuality, and I, reading them, began to wonder if he was ever going to recover his former style. Happily he does so, and with his letter of July 11th he gives a striking picture of a terrible incident of war, of which I don't remember to have read before, but, as I read it now, I seem to be witnessing it myself. From this point on he steadily develops his best, so that he ends on a fitting climax to all his writings of the War in his long final letter of October 6th—propaganda unashamed. The book should be thrust under the noses of those pacifists who now labour to minimise the past and to magnify the virtue and the value of their personal loving-kindness.
It has ever been my misfortune that the presence in a story of two characters confusably alike, or a setting within drowning distance of a tide-race, will produce in me an almost insuperable sense of its having been "made on purpose." I had therefore a double stroke of bad luck in finding both these elements present in The Splendid Fairing (Mills and Boon). But the more credit to Miss Constance Holme that, despite my increasing conviction that the wrong prodigal would return, and that the powers of nature were throughout almost visibly preparing to engulf him, the gentle and unforced power of her story did hold my attention till the final wave. Distinction shown in apparent absence of effort would, I think, be my verdict on her writing; she clearly knows her Northern farmer-folk with the sympathy of intimate experience. I hope I have not already suggested too much of the plot, a little tragedy of the commonplace dealing with the relations between two farming brothers, of whom the younger prospers while the elder fails, and the life-long jealousies of their women. Miss Holme works, one may say, on a minute scale; the short but simple annals of the poor interest her to the extent of providing an entire volume of three hundred odd pages from the events of a single day. But though now and then the old Northern counsel to "get eendways wi' it" does hover in the background of one's mind I repeat that sincerity carries the thing through. For all that, however, The Splendid Fairing did but confirm me in a previous impression that these Mary-call-the-cattle-home localities must remain more convenient to the local colourist than attractive to the inhabitants.
The publication, as a foreword, of a "Glossary of Native Words" used in the text made me wonder whether I should be bored or instructed, or both, by The Death Drum (Hurst and Blackett). Most happily I was neither. Miss Margaret Peterson has built her novel, perhaps a trifle hastily, about a quite uncommon theme and given it, in Uganda, a quite uncommon setting. It is the story of a half-caste who marries a white girl in order to avenge, in her degradation, his sister whom the English girl's brother had betrayed. I must not say that Tom Davis, the half-caste, is too much a white man—for Miss Peterson, to do her justice, has distributed goodness and badness among her blacks and whites with a quite impartial hand—but he is too fine a fellow to carry out his own plan, and, before he has done any lasting harm to the girl he has come to love, he takes himself, by way of a native rising, to a lotus-covered lake, and so out of her life. It seems a pity that the happiness of the story's end couldn't include Tom, but his ancestry effectually barred the way, and Miss Peterson has had to rely upon a very strong and not quite silent Englishman of the best type for her satisfactory finish.
Few authors have a shrewder idea than Mr. P. G. Wodehouse of what the British and American public want in the way of humour, and I do not know anyone more determined to supply their requirements. He would be a dull fellow indeed who did not appreciate the high spirits and humorous situations to be found in A Damsel in Distress (Jenkins). It is no small feat to maintain a riot of irresponsible fun for more than three hundred pages, but Mr. Wodehouse gets going at once, and keeps up the pace to the end without even a pause to get his second wind. If some of the characters—a ridiculous peer, his more ridiculous sister and his most ridiculous butler—are of the "stock" variety, Mr. Wodehouse's way of treating them is always fresh and amusing. But in his next frolic I beseech him to give golf and its tiresome lingo a complete rest.
