“In the main his studies of the American man, woman, and child at home are not only correct, but animated by a cordial pleasure in having seen people he likes, doing the things he likes.”
+ − N Y Times p2 O 3 ’20 1900w + Review 3:478 N 17 ’20 250w + Springf’d Republican p8 O 5 ’20 560w
GIBBS, SIR PHILIP HAMILTON. Wounded souls. *$2 (2c) Doran
The story is not so much a novel as it is an account of the war’s effect on human souls. We see it first in Lille with its inhuman savage hatred and lust for revenge on the part of the French and a revulsion of feeling in the English soldiers from patriotism to an abomination of the war. Then the author shows us the effect of the armistice on the German people and their reviving hope kindled by the fourteen points. Again in England the same irreconcilable spirit of hatred as in France and the ruthless, morbid, neurotic sullenness of the returned soldier. Between all these forces the crushing out of love and life in the young couple—the English officer and his German wife—whose humanity had carried them beyond nationality. The whole is a drastic picture of post-war Europe.
+ Booklist 17:116 D ’20
“In this book Philip Gibbs, with powerful, vital strokes, brings home to us that the war is not yet over, although fought and won.”
+ Cath World 112:685 F ’21 290w Cleveland p105 D ’20 60w
“Only a man who has been there could introduce so much background. Mr Gibbs was either too close to his material or too much the journalist to succeed in giving the atmosphere of an invaded country as well as Sir Harry Johnston has done in ‘Mrs Warren’s daughter.’ But his chronicle of public sentiment in England equals that of H. G. Wells’s stories of the war.”
+ − N Y Evening Post p22 O 23 ’20 230w