out the ears, "which was where he
always blushed," to the final glimpse of him, titled, an M.P., and,
incidentally, a bowed and better man, purified by the wonderful devotion of
_Rose_, the wife whom throughout the tale he has bullied and undervalued.
Nor is _Rose_ herself, with her unwavering belief in her clay idol, a less
memorable figure. Of the others, my chief affection went to _Aunt Polly_,
the kindly dealer in old clothes, who imagined the Savile to be a night
club. But, as I say, the whole cast is astonishingly real. Only once did I
fear for the story, when it seemed as though the machinations of a
super-villainous M.P. were about to lead it astray into the paths of
melodrama. But the danger proved to be brief, and the unexpected beauty and
dignity of the closing chapter would have redeemed a more serious lapse.

* * * * *

_Forced to Fight_ (HEINEMANN) is the record of a Schleswig Dane set forth
by ERICH ERICHSEN and very capably translated from the Danish by INGEBORG
LUND. It is a book that with a singular skill and with a passion that never
gets out of hand so as to convey the impression of hysterical exaggeration
lays bare the heart of a youth who was at the storming of Liege, fought in
Flanders, then on the Russian Front and again in the Argonne, whence a
shattered elbow sent him home broken and _aged_--that is what his
chronicler emphasises--not by the wound, but by the long horror and fatigue
of the successive campaigns. The poignancy of his sufferings lay in the
fact that as a Dane he went without any of the great hopes and passions
that inspired his German comrades, of whom however he speaks with no
ill-will. He took part by order in some of the "punishments" of Belgian
villages, loathing the savage cruelties of them and deeply convinced that
the rape of Belgium was an inexpiable wrong which the world will remember
to the lasting dishonour of the German name. You get an impression of the
added horror of this War for the imaginative temperamental, and some
pathetic pictures of all the suffering among simple innocent machine-driven
people on the other side, who had no will to war and no illusions as to the
splendour of world-dominion--a vision of desolate homes and countrysides
empty of all but very old men.

* * * * *

The first lines of _Still Life_ (CONSTABLE), which begins in "the night
train from the German frontier to Paris," gave me m