The German original of this novel had a larger circulation in the first year of its career than any novel of our days, close upon one quarter of a million copies having been sold. It was praised by some as a superb piece of imaginative literature of the realistic school: by others it has been anathematised as a libel on the great army that made Modern Germany. The truth about it is probably best summarised in the words of a reviewer of the "Daily Mail":--

"The author holds up the mirror with impartiality, without fear or passion, and with an unmistakably friendly intention, and asks, 'Where art thou going? Towards Jena or Sedan?'"

It is perhaps unnecessary to remind the English reader in explanation of the title that Jena stands for French supremacy and German defeat--Sedan for German victory and a French dÉbÂcle; but he should be warned that in this truthful mirror of life there may be details liable to shock insular notions. The author could not shrink from such in the fulfilment of his task, which was to give the truth--the whole truth and nothing but the truth. His work must be judged not only as a novel (and assuredly as such it is a most admirable and artistic piece of work), but it must be regarded also as the cry of a patriot who loves his country above anything in the world. This is most completely realised in the following opening sentences of a long and careful review given to the original by the "Spectator":--

"The Englishman who is acutely distressed by the report of shortcomings in the German Army can hardly be human. The frank pleasure which the Germans took in our troubles is too recent to be quite forgotten, even by a people so forgetful as we are. But for all that, only those who crave for the 'wicked joys of the soul,' which grow, the poet tells us, near by the gates of hell, can lay down Herr Beyerlein's story without a sense of sadness. In spite of its freshness and its humour, there breathes through it that note of disappointment, almost of lassitude, which is not seldom audible in Germany to-day. If is as though the nation, which has travelled such an astonishing distance in the last thirty years, were pausing to ask, 'Is this all that has come of it?'

"Herr Beyerlein's theme is the decadence of the German Army. That it is decadent he has no doubt at all, and he is a close, careful and not unfriendly observer. But the writer who deals boldly and broadly with the German Army is in reality dealing with a much larger subject. The British Army is a piece cut from the stuff of which the nation is made, and shaped to a particular end. In Germany the whole material of the nation passes through the Army, and is to some extent shaped and coloured in the process; if does not come out precisely as it went in. German military training is an iron pressure to which men cannot be submitted for two years at an impressionable age and remain unchanged. Symptoms of decay in the Army point, therefore, not only to possible disaster abroad, but to demoralisation at home; and it is with this aspect of his subject that Herr Beyerlein is chiefly concerned."

JENA OR SEDAN?