That is all the plot of the story, told with remarkable insight and a care
that is both sympathetic and wholly unsparing. I am mistaken if you will
not find it one of the most absorbing within recent experience. But I am
not saying that it may not leave you just a little uncomfortable.

* * * * *

BOYD CABLE is already one of the prose Laureates of the War, having earned
his wreath by _Between the Lines_ and _Action Front_. He now proves that he
is still entitled to it by _Grapes of Wrath_ (SMITH, ELDER). The two former
books gave us detached articles all relating to the one great subject. The
present book is a continuous story, the episodes of which are held together
by the deeds and characters of a quartette of friends, _Larry Arundel_,
_Billy Simson_, _Pug Sneath_, and the noble and adventurous American,
_Kentucky Lee_, who had enlisted in our Army to prove that "too proud to
fight" was a phrase which did not agree with the traditions of an old
Kentucky family. These four and the rest of the regiment, the Stonewalls,
are plunged into one of the big "pushes" of the British Army, and their
achievements in one form or another are thick on every page of the book.
The author has reduced the description of a modern battle to a fine art. No
one can describe more vividly the noise, the squalor, the terror, the high
courage, the self-sacrifice and again the nerve-shattering noise, that go
to make up the fierce confusion of trench-fighting. How anyone succeeds in
surviving when so many instruments are used for his destruction is a
mystery. The book is very certainly one to be read and re-read.

* * * * *

_Separation_ (CASSELL) is another of those intimate studies of Anglo-Indian
life that ALICE PERRIN has made specially her own. The tragedy of it is