and field, disquisitions on many strictly relevant and less relevant topics, reflections of that fine pride in the regiment which marks the best of soldiers, an occasional more ambitious survey of a battle or a campaign—­all this from a ready but not pretentious pen, guided by a sound intelligence and some power of observation, makes an admirable commentary.  Our author’s narrative carries us to those days of the great hopes of the Spring of 1917, hopes so tragically deferred.  Perhaps the best thing in an interesting sheaf is the description of the attack of the Guards Division—­as it had become—­on the Transloy-Lesboeufs-Ginchy road, with its glory and its carnage.

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It is to be feared that Battle Days (BLACKWOOD), a new work by Mr. ARTHUR FETTERLESS, author of Gog, will lose a good many readers as the result of the armistice.  There are battle stories and battle books that are not stories that will live far into the piping times of peace because they are human documents or have the stamp of genius.  These attractions are not present in Battle Days, which in truth is rather a prosy affair, though ambitious withal.  It is not fiction in the ordinary sense.  Mr. FETTERLESS essays to conduct the reader through every phase of a big “Push.”  Pushes were complicated affairs, and the author does not spare us many of the complications.  And unless the reader happens to be an ardent militarist he is apt to push off into slumberland.  Cadets should be made to read this book as a matter of instruction; for, though it lacks the subtle humour that endeared Duffer’s Drift to us, it provides a striking analysis of modern trench warfare.

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The Curtain of Steel (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is the fourth book which the author of In the Northern Mists has given us during the War, and in essentials it is the most valuable of the quartette.  For here we have real history, served, it is true, with some trimmings, but none the less a true record of the doings of our Grand Fleet since the day when the “curtain” was lowered.  “Nothing,” our author says, “nauseates a naval man so much as the attempt to represent him as a hero or to theatricalise him and his profession.”  It behoves me then to choose my words with the utmost circumspection, and I beg him to forgive my audacity when I say that, if I were Book-Controller, a copy of The Curtain of Steel would be in (and out of) the library of every school in the Empire.  I find courage to make this statement because I see that he does not deny that a part of our “disease of ignorance” concerning the Senior Service is due to the modesty of Naval men.  If he will please go on correcting that ignorance, and in the same inspiring style, I wish an even greater access of power to his elbow.

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