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Sergeant (to recruit wandering about at the will of his horse). "'Ere, you! What are you doin' there, ridin' up an' down like a general?"

In The Soul of the War (Heinemann) Mr. Philip Gibbs writes with that sympathy, perception and distinction which by diligent use of his deft and careful pen he has trained us to expect. He is at his worst in such passages as "I went out to aid them but did not like the psychology of this street, where death was teasing the footsteps of men, yapping at their heels." Red, whether of flags or trousers, is never mere red to him, but always "blood-red." And he lets himself be decoyed into patches of irrelevant purple—tiresome snares of his trade. "Heavens!" you seen to hear him say, "if this agony of war, this tragic blend of heroism and bestial savagery is not to move a man to eloquence will anything ever on God's earth?" And yet despite this reasonable plea it remains true that he is at his best where most direct and artless, and that there is some faint lapse from taste in fine writing about such infinitely poignant realities. That said, one can praise unreservedly both the matter and spirit of this book. And indeed both make such criticism seem rather too frigidly academic. Mr. Gibbs does not write as the complacent journalist reporting unique "stories." He gives both sides of his picture, the expected and the other: the courage and resource of men and the high glory of battle, the nausea and despairing depression, the occasional failure of the shattered spirit, the insurgent brutality, the haunting perplexity that shadows even the stoutest and most inspiring patriotism—"Why kill—or be killed—by men against whom I have (or had) no possible quarrel?" Passionately he wants us others never to us these dreadfully futile things happen again, and invites us to share the blame for a system which makes it possible. And this without assuming that there is anything else to be done now but bring a murderous group to justice, or without failing to recognise that to have yielded to the menaces of their power and insolence would have been a worse thing for the world than even the horrors it has found. It is not a book for the faint-hearted or the empty-headed—if there be any such left. The others should read it for its truth, its sincerity and the candour of its criticism.

If, as I suspect, Hyssop (Constable) is a first novel, it contains ample promise to make me expect considerable things from Mr. M. T. H. Sadler in the future. I say this because, while the present volume is agreeable enough—though the plot, which only develops in the final chapters, is grim and hardly for everybody's reading—it is obvious that the author is as yet by no means fully master of his art. As with many young writers, his power of observation has somewhat intoxicated him; detail, he has yet to learn, is for the novelist a good servant that can easily become a tyrant. For example, Mr. Sadler has remembered and recorded practically everything about the life of a modern Oxford undergraduate; but though the result is a wonderfully faithful presentation, it might well provoke impatience in those who have no personal associations to help the interest of the picture. It is too like a bound volume of The Isis. Through four-fifths of the book he records minutely the characters and trivial actions of Philip Murray and his undergraduate friends in order to prepare the effect of the one big event at the end. Occasionally, circumstance poignant has given to some of this detail an unexpectedly value. I found myself arrested, for example, by