(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)

Few will deny that, in writing The Life of Lord Kitchener (Macmillan) so soon after the death of the great Field-Marshal, Sir George Arthur has at least displayed the courage of his affection, since to publish such a work in a time of controversy like the present is inevitably to trail a coat of many colours, each a challenge to some particular prejudice. If, however, one can avoid any such attitude of parti pris and regard these three dignified volumes simply as the record of a great man by one who best knew and admired him, they will naturally be found of compelling interest. The three main chapters, so to say, of the story, Africa, India and Whitehall, will each call up vivid associations for the reader; each has been told carefully, with just sufficient detail. Perhaps circumstances made it unavoidable that Sir George Arthur should, if anything, rather overdo the discretion that is the better part of biography; certainly in the result one gets what might be called a close rather than an intimate study of a figure that in life was already almost legendary. If any man of our time was fittingly named great this was he—alike in his single-minded patriotism, his success and that touch of austerity which no anecdotes of exceptions can wholly disprove. In surveying his career of merited triumphs one remarks how often it was given to him—as at Omdurman and Pretoria—to redeem early disaster, and one feels again the pity of it that he might not live to see his noblest task accomplished at Versailles. No doubt the last word upon Kitchener of Khartum cannot be written yet awhile; in the meantime here is a book that will have its value as history hereafter, and is to-day a grateful tribute to one who nobly deserved gratitude.

Personally speaking, I could find it in me to wish that Mr. Maurice Hewlett would consult a good man about the Saga habit, which appears to be growing upon him, to the loss (or so I think) of all those who were lovers of his more human and companionable fiction. But I repeat that this is no more than individual prejudice, based on the fact that these Norse chronicles (of unpronounceable people in prehistoric times) leave me singularly cold. This apart, however, The Light Heart (Chapman and Hall) may be admitted an excellent sample of its kind. It is all about the friendship of Thorgar and Thormod, with the former's untimely death, and the punctilious attempts of the latter to fulfil his social obligation in the matter of exterminating the slayers of his friend; also, as second theme, the love of Thormod for King Olaf, and the ending of both of them—and of the tale also—in the heroic battle of Sticklestead. One way and another, indeed, you seldom saw a short book that contained more bloodshed, or in which love-making (oh, Mr. Hewlett!) played a smaller part. There was a "slip of a girl" in the early chapter of whom I had hopes, but sterner business caused her to be too soon eliminated. Skill and learning The Light Heart has in plenty, and an engaging suggestion of the early artistic temperament in the character of Thormod, fighter and song-maker. But I fall back on my old complaint of being left cold; and that I should suffer that way from the work of Mr. Hewlett gives you the measure of our loss.

In his last grim and terrible work, Realities of War (Heinemann), Sir Philip Gibbs has fairly flung aside the restraint, enforced or self-imposed, that marked his despatches from the fighting fronts, to present war, the horrible, senseless nightmare, as it really appeared to him. His work as a correspondent emphasised for him the accumulated miseries of thousands rather than any individual's share, and his point of view is as remorselessly gloomy as can be imagined. He is detailed in disgust; he is passionate in pessimism. He presents not only the soldier's distaste for trenches and machine guns, and his desire for the things of familiar life, but also, with surprising vehemence, his hatred of generals who give blundering orders from comfortable billets in the rear, or of munitioners in England who keep optimistic in spite of bad news from the Front. He does not pretend to be quite fair in his criticisms, for obviously the higher command had to keep out of the firing-line and somebody had to work—and hard too—to supply the torrent of munitions demanded. Sir Philip admits all that, but in a kind of agony calls on God and man to realise the meaningless horror of it all and forbid, at any price, the possibility of its recurrence. If sometimes unjust and nearly always tragical, the book none the less is free from anything like hysteria.

Mr. Ward Muir writes with one eye on the evening papers, and the very title (not to mention the wrapper) of Adventures in Marriage (Simpkin) lures us without any sense of difficult transition from the news of the day to the realms of romance. Fifteen stories are contained in this book, of rather unequal length and merit, nearly all of them dealing with a tense situation between husband and wife, several of them calculated to lift the hair, and one or two sufficiently ingenious in mechanism, I should think, to raise a curtain. The adventures are not all unhappy, and the author would seem on the whole to balance the scales fairly evenly between those who desire to reform the Divorce Law and those who would rather reform the world. With the exception of the first the tales are all effectively told and, if the machinery is fairly obvious, it does not click too much. The last on the list is much lengthier than all the others, belonging to the classic magazine school, which ransacks the bowels of the earth for a new and terrible setting. Here the heroine, a beautiful Chinese girl, is discovered by the hero, a missionary, in the cinnabar caverns of Hang Yiu, where the workers have never seen the light of day, are mostly blind and spend the intervals of labour in opium sleep. I like this yarn and recommend it to the attention of anybody who feels that marital squabbles are beginning to pall.

An excellent purpose will have been served by German Spies at Bay (Hutchinson) if it is carefully digested by those scaremongers who during the War insisted that spies were as plentiful as sparrows in Great Britain. Mr. Felstead tells us the truth, and, though it may offer too little of sensationalism for some tastes, it is very comforting to read. The fact is that the spies of the enemy were pounced upon so promptly and had such a harrowing time that both their quantity and quality gradually sank to something very like zero. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the miserable creatures who came spying to this country never had a dog's chance from the word "Go." One cannot waste one's sympathy upon those who for mercenary motives consented to be spies, but I am glad that Mr. Felstead pleads on behalf of such men as Carl Lody. "Some day," he writes, "when the nations of the world grow more sensible, there will be two methods of treating spies. Those who can prove patriotism as the inspiring motive will be dealt with as prisoners of war; the hirelings will be condemned to the death they richly deserve." The rules, as they stand, decreed that Lody had to be shot, but, if he could have received the treatment which brave men have a right to demand all the world over, I do not believe that even the most rabid Germanophobe would in his heart have been sorry.

Mountain Memories (Cassell) must, if honestly named, concern itself to a certain extent with mountains, but even those of us who have never felt the smallest wish to climb can read it with great pleasure. For although Sir Martin Conway does mention some of his mountaineering feats this book is concerned primarily with the spirit rather than with the body. "A Pilgrimage of Romance" is its sub-title, and, though there can't be many Pilgrims who have done better climbing, I doubt if any more difficult feat stands to his credit than this of putting these impressions of the quest of beauty so clearly and delicately before us. The least deviation from the path of modesty would have led him into trouble, but he never makes it. "Reader," he writes, "if you and I are to be real comrades we must share the same adventures of fancy and of soul.... My fairies must be thy fairies and my gods thy gods. Hand-in-hand we must thrill with a single rapture—'le coeur en fleur et l'Âme en flamme.'" For myself I am well content (whether he addresses me in the second person singular or plural, or both—as here) to have vicariously achieved such heights in the person of so admirable an agent.

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