The Forbidden Zone, by Mary Borden (Heinemann, Bs.), is a
collection of stories, sketches, poems and fragments written during four years of hospital work with the French army. They are impressionistic in the extreme, and therefore more emotionally than intellectually satisfying, but they are vivid as few stories of hospital life are, and the descriptions of life at a forward dressing-station, in /a zone interdite fill a gap in the literature of the War. And there are some snatches of acute observation—the description of men marching " bending forward as if the space between the weight that lay on them and the dusty road were not wide enough to hold them upright "—and the horror in the sudden smell of new-mown hay in nostrils accustomed only to blood and iodoform. It is an interesting book, and only fails to be impressive because it so often wanders off at the critical moment into a vague whirl of emotion, and loses the objective picture. But it keeps the reader on the stretch, and that is a virtue which is too often absent for us not to be grateful when we find it.
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