THE SLAVS OF THE WAR ZONE.• " Tim reason why
so few good books are written is that so few people that can write know anything." The class of authors condemned by Bagehot does not include Mr. W. F. Bailey. He has gone abroad out of his room ; he has used his ears and eyes ; and The Slays of the War Zone is the outcome. It is a vivid, interesting book, the matter of it fresh and entertaining, the style carelessly easy and agreeable. It ranges from the Baltic littoral to the southern shores of the Adriatic, and includes within its scope peoples as widely different as the primitive Ruthenes and the ultra-modern Czechs of Bohemia, but with the thread of common racial unity running through them all. It contains lurid pen-pictures of Serbia during the great retreat and Bosnia under Austro-German terrorism ; intimate sketches of country-house life in Poland and Croatia ; brisk descriptions of cosmopolitan Fiume and Laodiccan Vienna, of the gaiety of Budapest and the business enterprise of Prague : each with a separate charm and individuality of its own. But perhaps the best chapter in the book, certainly one of the most characteristic, is that on Czenstochowa, beginning with the market-place on a day of pilgrimage, the wonderful hurly-burly of pilgrims, Jews, and inhabitants, the medley of smells and colours, the noise, the confusion, and the fun ; passing on then to the unveiling of the sacred picture, the oldest in the Christian world ; and ending with the cannon of the German invader thundering on the horizon, while all the inhabitants whom war has spared, the feeble and the sick, old men, women, and children, huddle despairingly into their cottages and burn themselves to death rather than fall alive into the hands of the " devils in grey." Throughout the book the attitude of the author is sympathetic and explanatory rather than critical ; and he has given abundant proof of his possession of that quality which Dr. Johnson assigned as the chief merit of another traveller- • great variety of inquiry.
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