Secondly, I found it odd that the spy-hunters, after employing so many ruses and so much camouflage that one might say they almost refused to recognise their own reflections in a mirror, should proceed to the opposite extreme and arrange all their plans, with engaging frankness, over the telephone.  Finally, the tale, though full of admirable disconnected moments, does not carry one along sufficiently quickly. General Hannay was, I thought, too apt to interpolate lengthy reminiscences of active service, just when I wanted to get on with the matter in hand.  Pace in such affairs is everything, and my complaint is that, though the hunt had yielded some capital sport, its end found me with my pulse rather disappointingly calm.

* * * * *

As was to be expected, one of the signs of the times in literature, not of one country but of all, is a grim change in its attitude towards war.  The era of pomp and circumstance, as of genial make-believe, is gone by; more and more are our writers beginning to give us militarism stripped of romance, a grisly but (I suppose) useful picture.  I have nowhere found it more horrible than in a story called The Secret Battle (METHUEN), written by Mr. A.P.  HERBERT, whose initials are familiar to Punch readers under work of a lighter texture.  This is an intimate study, inspired throughout by a cold fury of purpose that can be felt on every page, of the destruction of a young man’s spirit in the insensate machinery of modern war.  There is no other plot, no side issues, no relief.  From the introduction of Harry Penrose, fresh from Oxford, embarking like a gallant gentleman upon the adventure of arms, to the tragedy that blotted him out of a scheme that had misused and ruined him, the record moves with a dreadful singleness of intent.  Sometimes, one at least hopes, the shadows may have been artificially darkened.  It seems even to-day hardly credible that events should conspire to such futility of error.  But as a story with a purpose, not, in spite of the publisher’s description, a novel, The Secret Battle certainly deserves the epithet “striking.”  It is a blow from the shoulder.

* * * * *

The worst of quotations is that either their staleness is tedious or their unfamiliarity irritates.  Mr. S.G.  TALLENTYRE has at least one, generally of the latter sort, and oftener half-a-dozen, on every page of Love Laughs Last (BLACKWOOD), or, at any rate, that is one’s first impression of the book; while the second is that the number of characters is not much less.  It follows that in trying to identify all the persons to whom he may or may not have been introduced in the previous pages, and all the phrases in inverted commas he has certainly seen somewhere else sometime, the truly diligent reader will be kept faithfully at his task—­a pleasant one possibly, but just a thought too much like hard work to be quite entertaining in a novel.  Apart