HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
A GALLOPER AT YPRES. By Lieut.-Col. P. R. Butler, D.S.O. Unwin. 15s. net.
A KUT PRISONER. By H. C. W. Bishop. Lane. 6s. 6d. net.
THE ROMANCE OF THE BATTLE LINE IN FRANCE. By J. E. C. Bodley. Constable. 7s. 6d. net.
Here are three new additions to the colossal pile of "war books"—two of them the personal records of soldiers, the third a more pretentious effort by a civilian. Colonel Butler went out in 1914 with the Seventh Division to Belgium, was engaged in the first battle of Ypres, came home wounded, returned to Flanders, went thence to the Somme (in the days before the Somme became hell), and leaves us finally at Marseilles on his way to "some other theatre of war." The book contains nothing very remarkable, but it is agreeably written, and should give pleasure to the author's friends and to others who care to be reminded again of "Somewhere in France," where they have marched and fought and billeted.
Mr. Bishop's is a modestly told and mildly exciting story of an escape from the Turks. He was an Indian Army subaltern captured at Kut, and interned at Kastamuni. Thence with two companions he got away to the Black Sea coast, was recaptured and rescued again. The rescuers were a handful of diverting brigands, with whose help Mr. Bishop eventually crossed the Black Sea and made his way home viâ Russia. There is no attempt to generalise either about military matters or prison life. We gather, however, that Mr. Bishop and his friends were not on the whole badly treated by the Turks. And there was a time, in 1916, when they lived well—eggs at halfpenny a piece, good white flour at sixpence a pound, and fruit practically gratis! O blessed Kastamuni!
Mr. Bodley is more sophisticated. In the first half of his book he takes us over the battlefields of France, and discourses of the captains and the kings, the priests and politicians of past centuries who fought and played and intrigued there, of the glories and beauties of the old towns and villages of the Somme and the Marne, of Rheims and Verdun and a hundred other places. But he completely changes the angle of his attack in the second half of his volume, which he calls, "An additional chapter on the results of the late war as affecting our national life and imperial interests." His main theme appears to be the necessity or desirability of continuing hostility to Germany. The Germans, he thinks, are still a fundamentally evil race whose worst faults we imitate and whose few virtues we eschew. These virtues are their commercial enterprise, their zest for town-planning and housing, and the comparatively small amount of money they waste in paying lawyers. Lawyers, it appears, are Mr. Bodley's bête noire; he regards them, and especially the political barristers and the overpaid judges and law officers, as the curse of our unhappy country. But what chiefly raises his ire are the abominations which we are said to have copied from Prussia of bureaucracy and the system of "honours"—peerages, baronetcies, knighthoods, Orders of Merit, Orders of the British Empire, poured out in bucketfuls on a motley crowd of corrupt or undistinguished individuals. This is, of course, an indictment which any writer is entitled to make, though some may think that Mr. Bodley occasionally lets himself be carried rather far by his indignation. But the connection with the faults of Germany seems a little far-fetched. There are times, too, in the course of his special pleading when he verges on the ridiculous. Is it not absurd, for example, to say that "the formidable machinery of state socialism" (meaning chiefly Old Age Pensions and National Insurance) is "incompatible with representative government"? And who wants a long argument to prove that Queen Victoria was not responsible for the plague of Germanism which Mr. Bodley thinks has infected English society? The whole of this "additional chapter" is a melancholy illustration of the effect of the war in causing an educated Englishman to lose his sense of proportion.
RECORDS. By Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher. Hodder & Stoughton. £1 1s. net.
The plain man who walks in the trim garden of literature must feel, in coming upon Lord Fisher in print, as we imagine the shade of Bach might feel confronted by a jazz band, or an elementary drawing mistress before a canvas of Mr. Wyndham Lewis. Lord Fisher has for many months been "the talk of the town"; the respectable reviewer feels that only in the talk of the town can the appropriate comments be found. Records begins thus: "Of all the curious fables I've ever come across, I quite think the idea that my mother was a Cingalese Princess of exalted rank is the oddest! One can't see the foundation of it!" And it ends with a letter from a fellow-Admiral suggesting that Lord Fisher, like Jesus Christ, is an Enigma. Between those two passages there is a roaring torrent of anecdote, of quotations and exclamation marks and capital letters, of criticism (often highly "indiscreet"), of apologia, of confident prediction, of everything that is diverting and irritating and arresting and astoundingly human—a torrent that sweeps the reader off his feet and leaves him gasping and incredulous. The book is a monument of magnificent egoism. One can only use its author's own word of a sermon by Dean Inge and say it is "splendiferous." We are told, in parenthesis, that he got into the Navy by writing out the Lord's Prayer, doing a Rule of Three sum, and drinking a glass of sherry. We are told that he looks like a Christmas-tree when he wears his decorations. We have stories of how, in his shirt-sleeves and with a boot in each hand, he entertained King Edward VII. in his bedroom, and of a comic postcard sent to him by Queen Alexandra. There is one chapter devoted to his views on the Bible, and another containing a reprint of four speeches which he made: one at the Royal Academy Banquet, a second at the Mansion House, the other two (and these would both go on a postcard) in the House of Lords. There are numerous photographs of him standing on his quarter-deck with Kings and Tsars, and gentlemen grotesquely clad in top hats and frock coats; there is a long appendix containing a list of Lord Fisher's "Great Naval Reforms." His style beggars description. He throws epithets such as "lovely" about like a high-spirited schoolgirl. He tells us, with the candour of a schoolboy, that Sir William Harcourt was "a genial ruffian" and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach "a perfect beast." The whole book is ablaze with these bright flowers. And let us not be misunderstood: we say nothing in disparagement of them. Would that more biographies were written so!
But Lord Fisher, we suspect, has suffered, and will suffer, from the defects—or should one say the excess?—of his qualities. It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an Englishman—and above all an official Englishman—to take a man seriously who writes and talks and thinks like this. Hinc illæ lacrimæ! as our author might say (for he loves his tags). And yet there is serious stuff in this book—discussions of the conduct of the war, of naval tactics and education, of submarines and oil-engines and guns, and "Admiralty limpets." He has quarrelled on all these matters—and on a thousand more, no doubt—with many of his colleagues. It is not for us to take sides in such Homeric contests. Even now he is trailing his coat again before the respectable public with a hectic chapter entitled "Democracy." "Democracy," he says, "means 'equal opportunity for all.'" A real Democracy in England would not have permitted secret treaties nor flouted the Russian Revolution, nor "kept true Labour leaders waiting on the doormat." "Hereditary titles," he cries, "are ludicrously out of date ... and the sooner we sweep away all the gimcracks and gewgaws of snobbery the better." And, in short, this old warrior of seventy-nine, a Peer of the Realm, dressed like a Christmas-tree in his decorations, the intimate of Kings and Emperors, declares himself a Republican, and wants to "sack the lot"! Words fail us; we can only lay the book down and pant for the next!