Before Port Arthur in a Destroyer. Translated from the Spanish
ly Captain R. Grant, D.S.O. (John Murray. 3s. 6d. net.)—The -translator tells us that he has "verified names and dates" as far ab he could, but that he does not hold himself responsible for the accuracy of the narrative,—his original is itself a translation from the Japanese. For ourselves, we have seen no reason to doubt; but then the story is not one easily verified. Very few, too, are the critics who can speak with authority on the details of a, fight, under the naval conditions of the present. The narrative takes in a period of something less than a year : January 26th, 1904— January 4th. 1905. The most animated part of it is the story of the boarding of a Russian ship early in March. " It was a sight which is seldom seen at sea," writes the officer, "and from which one derives peculiar satisfaction—fighting against men full of vitality instead of inert steel." Ultimately two only out of the Russian crow of forty-five survived. But then more than two-thirds had been killed by the previous cannonade. The hand-to-hand fighting took place at the cabin whither those that remained had retreated. It reads like a passage in Fenimore Cooper or Marryat. Here, however, is a little touch which these writers would hardly have ventured: "In the end one becomes so bloodthirsty that one feels a cruel disappointment at not meeting with more resistance when only dead men or prisoners are left."
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