AND STOUGHTON) is, as its name tells you, nearer to date than most.
The writer, Mr. F.A. MCKENZIE, was a Canadian war correspondent whom
the Canadian Staff, believing (as he himself says) "that the right
place for a war correspondent is where he can see what he is supposed
to describe," allowed to live among the troops in the front line. As a
result of this unusual privilege, his pictures of the great fights in
the last stages of the War have the reality of personal experience.
The actual smashing of the Line, for example, is an epic of heroism
and achievement still hardly realised by people at home, who cling to
an idea that the final victories were gained over an enemy enfeebled
and at disadvantage. There are other chapters in the record that
may perhaps hardly be welcomed at this moment by those amiable
sentimentalists who would have us treat the enemy as a Bosch and a
brother. The hospital raid at Etaples is one of them; when, even after
the light of the burning huts had made ignorance impossible, the
gentle Hun, swooping low, swept with machine-gun fire the nurses and
doctors who were attempting to remove the wounded. That, I think, is a
memory that will linger. Another picture, queerly disproportionate in
the anger it excites, is that of the fruit garden in a great country
house, with its wealth of famous old peach and pear trees still in
place along the walls, but every one methodically sawn through. By
comparison a trifling crime, but somehow I may forget other things
more easily. One would welcome the revised judgment of Dr. SOLF upon
this particular expression of the German spirit.

* * * * *

To those who have been persuaded by writers like Mr. H.G. WELLS that
the horse has not and ought not to have any part in modern warfare,
Captain SIDNEY GALTREY'S _The Horse and the War_ ("COUNTRY LIFE")