ave served
to idealise the European slaughter-house.

* * * * *

The work is of the first rank, and is so full of matter that more than
one article would be requisite to present its whole scope. All that I
shall attempt to deal with here will be the chief aspects--its artistry
and its thought.

The dominant impression it conveys is one of extreme objectivity. Save
in the last chapter, wherein Barbusse expounds his ideas on social
questions, we do not make the author's acquaintance. He is there among
his obscure companions; he struggles and suffers with them, and from one
moment to another his disappearance seems imminent; but he has the
spiritual strength which enables him to withdraw himself from the
picture and to veil his ego. He contemplates the moving spectacle, he
listens, he feels, he touches; he seizes it, with all his senses on the
stretch. Marvellous is the assured grasp displayed by this French
spirit, for no emotion affects the sharpness of the outline or the
precision of the technique. We discern here manifold touches, lively,
vibrant, crude, well fitted to reproduce the shocks and starts of the
poor human machines as they pass from a weary torpor to the
hyperaesthesia of hallucination--but these juxtaposed touches are placed
and combined by an intelligence that is ever master of itself. The style
is impressionist. The author is prone, unduly prone in my opinion, to
make use of visual word-plays after the manner of Jules Renard. He is
fond of "artistic writing," a typically Parisian product, a style which
in ordinary times seems to "powder puff" the emotions, but which, amid
the convulsions of the war, exhibits a certain heroic elegance. The
narrative is terse, gloomy, stifling; but there come episodes of repose,
which break its unity, and by these the tension is relieved for a
moment. Few readers will fail to appreciate the charm, the discreet
emotion, of these episodes, as for instance in the chapter "On Leave."
But three-fourths of the book deal with the trenches of Picardy, under
the "muddy skies," under fire and under water--visions now of hell, now
of the flood.

There the armies remain buried for years, at the bottom of an eternal
battlefield, closely packed, "chained shoulder to shoulder," huddling
together "against the rain which descends from the skies, against the
mud which oozes from the ground, against the cold, an emanation from the
infinite which is all-per