that she was observing. "A POLISH GIRL (C.B.)" has written
this account with an engaging frankness and an apparent lack of
exaggeration which distinguish it among books of its kind. It is
largely a record of school days, and "C.B.," as the child of a Polish
Jew of good standing living in Posen, suffered slights and insults
and met with injustices which a "true German" would not have had to
endure; but she does not seem embittered. Her picture of the German at
home has not made me yearn to renew my acquaintance with him, but it
seems to explain the origin of some of his most unpleasant qualities.
Since, as "C.B." and other writers would have us know, the German
soldier was cowed by physical suffering in peace-time it is small
matter for wonder that he became a brute in war, or that the citizen,
to whom everything used to be _verboten_, has, since the bureaucracy
which regulated his smallest actions went to pieces, shown very little
ability to regulate them for himself. The terrible pact, by which
in the ten years preceding the War thousands of German women bound
themselves to combat the predominance of the landed classes, which
was making life for ordinary people a slow starvation, is one of the
things which I am induced to believe, because "C.B." has dealt so
faithfully with others of which I knew already. Of books on Germany
from within there have been very many, but there is still room for
such books as this.

* * * * *

You must not be shocked to find that Captain HARRY GRAHAM has
(apparently) abandoned the lighter fields of literature for the heavy
plough-land of Biography. What is, I believe, his initial venture of
this kind lies before me in _Biffin and His Circle_ (MILLS AND BOON),
a record of the career of _Reginald Drake Biffin_, that eminent
author with whose works (_The Bolster Book_, and others) the public
is already familiar; though, by a pardonable confusion, they are more
usually associated with the name of the present biographer. It may be
said at once that, if a life of _Biffin_ had to be written, Captain
GRAHAM was emphatically the man for the task; indeed, from the
preface, with its absorbing account of the inception of the work in
certain alleged convivialities between author and publishers, to the
final chapter, there is not a page that is not calculated to
inspire the reader with profound (and in my own case frequently
uncontrollable) emotion. Nor is the work valuab