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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_BY MR. PUNCH'S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS_).

Battle-books have already come to wear (even in so short a time) a
strangely archaic aspect. But _Through the Hindenburg Line_ (HODDER
AND STOUGHTON) is, as its name tells you, nearer to date than most.
The writer, Mr. F.A. MCKENZIE, was a Canadian war correspondent whom
the Canadian Staff, believing (as he himself says) "that the right
place for a war correspondent is where he can see what he is supposed
to describe," allowed to live among the troops in the front line. As a
result of this unusual privilege, his pictures of the great fights in
the last stages of the War have the reality of personal experience.
The actual smashing of the Line, for example, is an epic of heroism
and achievement still hardly realised by people at home, who cling to
an idea that the final victories were gained over an enemy enfeebled
and at disadvantage. There are other chapters in the record that
may perhaps hardly be welcomed at this moment by those amiable
sentimentalists who would have us treat the enemy as a Bosch and a
brother. The hospital raid at Etaples is one of them; when, even after
the light of the burning huts had made ignorance impossible, the
gentle Hun, swooping low, swept with machine-gun fire the nurses and
doctors who were attempting to remove the wounded. That, I think, is a
memory that will linger. Another picture, queerly disproportionate in
the anger it excites, is that of the fruit garden in a great country
house, with its wealth of famous old peach and pear trees still in
place along the walls, but every one methodically sawn through. By
comparison a trifling crime, but somehow I may forget other things
more easily. One would welcome the revised judgment of Dr. SOLF upon
this particular expression of the German spirit.

* * * * *

To those who have been persuaded by writers like Mr. H.G. WELLS that
the horse has not and ought not to have any part in modern warfare,
Captain SIDNEY GALTREY'S _The Horse and the War_ ("COUNTRY LIFE")
will come as a revelation. Mr. WELLS has said that the sight of a
soldier wearing spurs makes him sick, or words to that effect; yet
so neglectful were our military authorities of Mr. WELLS'S opinions
and teaching that they went on steadily adding horses, many of them
cavalry horses, to the Army. We began the War with twenty-five
thousand horses, and we finished it wi