TWO GOOD WAR BOOKS.* Tux worst of trying to write
an adequate -review of a book like this one of Mr. Hilton Young's' is that it is so very much better than anything one can say about it that one wants to fill several columns with quotations—and that unfortunately is not per- mitted by our, space. Let us then say concisely that it is one of the very best books we have seen about the late war. Mr. Hilton Young is an admirable writer,.quite free from that strain- ing after effect which spoils so many books of the kind. He writes simply and naturally about the things that he saw, and incidentally—but quite unconsciously—draws a picture of his own personality which inclines one to envy his shipmates. He saw more than most. At the outset of the war, like so many men who were over what was then called military age, he thought that for civilians to put themselves forward as combatants would be ridiculous. But a sudden demand arose for skilled decipherers with the Grand Fleet, and he volunteered to help. This -led to " the most surprising of possessions—a commission as lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve." Very soon Mr. Young passed from the writing to the executive branch of the service. His first chapter is an extraordinarily vivid picture of the monotonous life of the Grand Fleet during the first year of the war. He left Scapa to take up a post on the naval mission to Serbia, " feeling like a boy leaving schooL" The second chapter _deals with the Austrian invasion of Serbia and the terrible plight of the routed though not broken Serbian army. It was at Belgrade that Mr. Young first met hostile shell- fire, and his reflections on the occasion admirably express what many of us can remember inarticulately feeling:— " Then I am under fire, and this is a battle. I was right in my conjecture on the steamer : battles nowadays are not at all like those of which I have read in books. Here we are, two combatants, and a battle has begun, -and yet there seems to be no particular reason why we should.not go on buying our cigar- ettes. Yes, there is a reason : there is nobody left to sell them to us—the woman has run away. There is another reason besides : I feel -a very odd -sensation ; I wonder if it is that I want to run away too. That is another shell that has screamed past close overhead, and it has fallen in the middle of the square. Now I am sure about it—I do want to run away very much. I want to get somewhere where the shells cannot see me, even if it be inside this canvas booth only. Do I want to do that more than I want to, preserve an air of indifference and_ calm before Bullock ? I think I want more to appear indifferent And calm. The truth is I am very much excited, and what I most want 'is to do something very -strenuous-ss,a relief from my excitement. One strenuous thing to do would be to run away aahard as I can, but to -stay where I am and to appear indifferent and calm is really at the moment a more strenuous thing still ; that is the best thing to do, to relieve this unpleasant strain."
Mr. Young's next service was with the Harwich naval force, which he joined soon after the battle of Jutland, and with which he participated in several small actions :- "lb is the most .wonderful noise in the world, the noise of - a warship's; guns in action close at hand. On the open sea, with no land near to confuse the sound, it has a special resonance and intensity that is all its own. It comes in deafening claps of thunder, their quick succession and-tremendous force eloquent of fury and defiance. ' It is a dreadful and a majestic noise,' I thought ; it is touching a nerve that no noise ever touched before—some nerve with a deep seat. Why is it so awfully magnificent P I think it is:because one seems to hear speaidng in that thunder the very voice of the *reat England of history. Of course that is the only way in which she could speak, the England of Drake and Nelson. It was in this very place , too, that the tspoke with the same voice to the Spanish Armada. How glorious she is when one hears her great utterance pro- claiming defiance to oppression ! ' and, as the guns thundered, a train of fine words tossed up by some freak of memory kept slipping over and over through my mind—' All honour, might, majesty, dominion and glory.' " From the Harwich flotilla Mr. Young went to command an old 9.2 naval gun among the sand-dunes near Nienport. The ti) By tea and Land. By B. Hilton Young.1LP. Loudon : Jack. fl2R. 6d. net.)---(2) _Eastern Nights and Plights. By " Contact" (Alan Bott). Hdin- burgh': Blackwood. [7a. ad. net.] present writer also spent the summer of 1917 in that pleasant but lively neighbourhood, and can vouch from personal experi. ence for the marvellous fidelity of Mr. Young's picture of his environment and of the daily routine. The duels between Barrington and N. X. 3, the friendly subaltern from a neighbour- ing O.P. who found the war a boring interruption in his pre- occupation with " the works of Mr. Epstein," the gas bombard- ment during which " one sees one's fellow man dimly through obscure glass panes as a hideous, fishy monster of the deep," the dying man brought in at night from a sudden avalanche of German shell on the Aeolian Road, who opened his lips just before he died to say, " There's more of us up on the road," all furnish unforgettable vignettes. Thence Mr. Young was brought back to England for a special show, " something very pink." This turned out to be the raid of St. George's Day on Zeebrugge, where our author—though he does not mention the fact—lest his right arm. Nothing could be finer than his description oi this astonishing performance, with its grim little touches like the picture of the platoon of marines whom he found crouchno on the deck of the Vindictive ' in the dark—" A marine office 11 looked down from the landing platform. Aren't these folks going over ? ' I asked. These are all gone,' he said." Most men would have had enough of the war by then, but within three months Mr. Young contrived to get command of an armoured train on the Archangel front, which forms the subject of his last fascinating chapter. We can only repeat that he has given us one of the ablest and most impressive war books yet written.
Captain Bott gave us some years ago an extremely good account of aviation on the Western front.- His new book' describes his experiences after he was shot down and taken prisoner by the Turks in Palestine, and his various attempts at escape, of which the last was successful a few weeks before the Armistice. It is a most amusing record of almost incredible adventures, and the thumb-nail sketches of Oriental character with which it abounds are as good as anything of the kind since Eothen. The Turk has changed very little, indeed, since the days of Kinglake. The picture of Constantinople in the last months of the war is a brilliant piece of work. Pleasant, too, is the account of the indomitable survivors of Kut, still doing their bit, who were employed in trans-shipping German aeroplanes at the unfinished Taurus tunnels, and took care, at the daily risk of their lives, to see that no machine which had passed through their careful hands was likely to fly without extensive repairs- " sabbertage, as yer might say."
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