13 NOVEMBER 1920, Page 23

Noel Dyson Williams. By his Mother, Rosalind H. Dobbs. (Methuen.

7s. 6d. net.)—Min. Dobbs, who is a sister of Mrs, Sidney Webb and Lady Courtney, has published this touching little book in memory of her son. Noel Williams was a young Cambridge man who had just obtained a post at the Ealing County Council School when the war broke out and he enlisted in one of the Public School Battalions, afterwards obtaining a commission and being posted to -the Intelligence Corps, where his knowledge of German was of great service. In the middle of 1918 he felt it incumbent on him to give up this comparatively safe job and return to regimental duty with the fighting troops. He was killed while leading a platoon near Tournai a few days before the Armistice. "Caught like a rat in a trap and mown down by the senseless mechanical fire of a German machine gun, he fell fighting for some miserable position that did not matter." What does matter, if we may say so, is the fine example which he set and the devotion to a nameless duty which he shared with so many others of those gallant subalterns who, more than any other single class of men, were responsible for our victory over "the mad, insensate spirit of militarism."