But on the chance that one or two of them may be applicable to human
life I have jotted them down here. One never knows which is grain and
which chaff until afterwards.

* * * * *


=OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.=

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks_.)

We have had many studies of the War, in various aspects, from our
own army. Now in _My ·75_ (HEINEMANN) there comes a record of the
impressions of a French gunner during the first year of fighting. It
is a book of which I should find it difficult to speak too highly.
PAUL LINTIER, the writer, had, it is clear, a gift for recording
things seen with quite unusual sharpness of effect. His word-pictures
of the mobilisation, the departure for the Front, and the fighting
from the Marne to the Aisne (where he was wounded and sent home) carry
one along with a suspense and interest and quite personal emotion that
are a tribute to their artistry. His death (the short preface tells us
that, having returned to the Front, he was killed in action in March,
1916) has certainly robbed France of one who should have made a
notable figure in her literature. The style, very distinctive, shows
poetic feeling and a rare and beautiful tenderness of thought, mingled
with an acceptance of the brutality of life and war that is seen in
the vivid descriptions of incidents that our own gentler writers would
have left untold. The horror of some of these passages makes the book
(I should warn you) not one for shaken nerves. But there can be no