of whom, Malory, is supposed to relate portions of the affair to the quite superfluous outsider who puts them down.  This viva-voci recital is subsequently rounded off by Malory, in what is surely the least credible of all the unlikely letters in fiction, nearly a hundred printed pages of it.  So you see the obstacles that Miss SACKSVILLE-WEST has placed in her own and her reader’s path.  That, despite them all, the interest, and passion of this first novel do get home is an encouraging omen for her success when she has learnt a greater simplicity of attack.

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Wings of the Morning (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) might have been a most recommendable book, for it is in essentials a pleasant story of a great artist who for the crime of his hot-headed youth suffered imprisonment in the United States, and, having “covered his tracks,” came home, fell in love with his delightful sister’s delightful step-daughter and, after much suffering for them both, told his history and won his lady.  But unfortunately the inessentials—­and among these I have the temerity to include the great European War, or, at any rate, very much that is here told of it—­are so harrowing that they do not accord with the pleasant story to which they are tacked on.  I would not ask to be spared the knowledge of anything faced by other people while I sat immune at home, but there are many incidents which cannot with decency or dignity be served up in fiction to add a thrill to the enjoyment of an hour’s light reading.  Miss JOAN SUTHERLAND would have done well to have left detail to more serious exponents, and to have discarded entirely one scene of bestial cruelty which has no real bearing on her tale.  Never in a novel—­and seldom in historical accounts of fighting—­have I been asked to wallow in so much gore.  It is all the more regrettable because when Miss SUTHERLAND uses her imagination on less horrible subjects she is much more successful.

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Mr. ARTHUR TURBERVILLE has taken almost over-elaborate pains with his sketch of a type which must have been common enough in the new armies—­the young officer of pacifist leanings, who, intellectually convinced of the futility of war and by no means out of sympathy with the ultralogical or illogical (and anyway impossible) position of the Conscientious Objector, yet joins up and makes the very best of a bad job. Kenneth, Dugdale (METHUEN), the prize prig (according to the verdict of his Mess), became a brave and efficient subaltern; and the author’s idea of bringing him by means of the discipline of war-training and war itself to a better understanding of the ordinary spontaneous fighting types, and of bringing these by the same discipline to a readier appreciation of the intellectual and idealist position, is well enough worked out.  The character-drawing impressed me less favourably.  The author, I should say, finds