MURRAY (MURRAY).  For I have never been “up to” anybody; I have never been present at “absence”; I have no real understanding of the difference between a “tutor” and a “dame”; I call a “p[oe]na” by the plebeian name of “imposition”; and, until I had read Mr. AINGERS’S book, I had never heard of the verb “to brosier” or the noun substantive “bever.”  Altogether my condition is most deplorable.  Yet there are some alleviations in my lot, and one of them has been the reading of this delightful book.  I found it most interesting, and can easily imagine how Etonians will be absorbed in it, for it will revive for them many an old and joyful memory of the days that are gone.  Mr. AINGER discourses, with a mitis sapientia that is very attractive, on the fashions and manners of the past and the gradual process of their development into the Eton of the present.  He is proud, as every good Etonian must be, of Eton as it exists, but now and again he hints that the Eton of an older time was in some respects a simpler and a better place.  The mood, however, never lasts long, and no one can quarrel with the way in which it is expressed.  General LYTTELTON, too, in one of his contributions, relates how on his return from a long stay in India he visited Eton, expecting to be modestly welcomed by shy and ingenuous youths, and how, instead, he was received and patronised by young but sophisticated men of the world.  The GENERAL, I gather, was somewhat chilled by his experience.  Altogether this book is emphatically one without which no Etonian’s library can be considered complete.

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Perhaps of all our War correspondents Mr. PHILIP GIBBS contrives to give in his despatches the liveliest sense of the movement, the pageantry and the abominable horror of war.  Pageantry there is, for all the evil boredom and weariness of this pit-and-ditch business, and Mr. GIBBS sees finely and has an honest pen that avoids the easy cliche.  You might truthfully describe his book, The Battles of the Somme (HEINEMANN), as an epic of the New Armies.  He never seems to lose his wonder at their courage and their spirit, and always with an undercurrent of sincerely modest apology for his own presence there with his notebook, a mere chronicler of others’ gallantry.  This chronicle begins at the glorious 1st of July and ends just before Beaumont-Hamel, which the author miserably missed, being sent home on sick leave.  It is a book that may well be one of those preserved and read a generation hence by men who want to know what the great War was really like.  God knows it ought to help them to do something to prevent another.  Yet there is nothing morbid in it.  As the sergeant thigh-deep in a flooded trench said, “You know, Sir, it doesn’t do to take this war seriously.”  The armies of a nation that takes its pleasures sadly take their bitter pains with a grin; and that grin is what has made them such an unexpectedly tough proposition to the All-Seriousest.