SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
(Sake lAie column does not necessarily preclude saldesueni ',screw.] Christine. By Alice Cliolmondoley. (Macmillan and CO. Cs. net.) —This very interesting and pathetic book contains the letters written to Mrs. Cholmondeley by her daughter, who wont to Berlin in. May, 1914, to study the violin, and died at Stuttgart on August 8th following of pneumonia contracted on her journey toward; the frontier. Miss Cholmondoley went prepared to love the Germano,
• Stanassr. By Edith Wharton. Leadoff: Macmillan and Co. Pia esti
and her first letters are full of the enthusiasm natural in a bright young girl who was an ardent nursiehm. She stayed with a German family in the country and became engaged to a Gorman officer. Then the thunderclouds of war came morose the clear sky, and the young girl began to find out what her German friends were really thinking. " I've come to the conclusion," she writes on July 211th, " that the Griffis too wants war " ; and on the same day she admits, " I find 1 have is profound distrust really of these people." Her betrothed, who had linen rocallcsl by telegraph to his duties as early as July 24th, tried to minimise the danger of a European war, but all his family and friends and the people of Berlin seemed to revel in the prospect. The letter describing the excited crowd in Berlin on July 31st, as soon as it was knows that Germany had sent an ulti- matum to Russia, is a vivid piece of writing about " these solid burghers and their families behaving like drunken hooligans." The Pan theist theory that an innocent Germany was driven into the war by a brutal Resoia does not square with the facts in those enter- taining letters.
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