18 JULY 1925, Page 25

OTHER NOVELS

in the last years of the War is strikingly brought out in Miss Caroline Kerr's translation of Mr. Kellermann's novel. The Ninth of November. As fiction it must be owned that the book is disjointed and a little difficult to follow, but the reader will be left with a vivid picture in his mind of splendid, albeit • unhappy, luxury on the one side and sordid conditions of starvation and sickness on the other. It is wholesome dis- cipline for the English reader to read the account of the campaigns of 1918 from the opposite standpoint. The optimism of March and the pessimism of June, July and thenceforward are so striking an inversion of the feelings of the Allies that the truism that there can be no victory without a corresponding defeat has never been more forcibly brought home. The book might be recommended as pro- paganda for the League of Nations.