FICTION.
WAY OF REVELATION.•
READERS of Mr. Wilfrid Ewart's former literary work will not be surprised, when opening his first novel, which is about the War, to find that the English in which it is written is far above the average of that of most works of fiction ; but it is a thousand pities that so good a piece of work devoted to this particular theme should be published at this moment. Stories about the War have just got into the " blind spot " of most readers. Three years ago they were immediately interesting. Seven or eight years hence they will be historic- ally absorbing. Just now the world is taken with disgust at the doings of the last seven years, and certainly should not be reminded of them in the hours devoted to entertainment, • Way of Revelation. By Willtid Ewart. London : Putnam'. [7s. 6d. net-2 which may be supposed to be the hours in which novels are read. Nevertheless, this book is an excellent achievement. The accounts of the fighting are so realistically given that they deserve to be read aloud at a Peace Conference, and it is quite certain that when the reading was over every delegate would record his -vote for complete disarmament. Take, for
instance, this description of a battlefield at night :— " Night fell upon the battlefield. It was the hour for the burial of the dead.
To Lieutenant Knoyle—who, as it happened, had been detailed to remain among the officers in reserve—befell this duty. A cold rain drove in gusts. A wet wind blew. Gloom and darkness lay over all. Gloom and darkness reigned in his heart. Bitterness strangled it.
They lay around—scores of them, a ,hundred, three—four hundred. Impenetrable blaclmess hid them. But when the starlights went up they could be seen as men sleeping—vague shapes outlined upon the ridge of a trench, upon the lip of a shell-hole.
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Mingled with the soil, torn from their bodies—their letters, their pipes, their photographs of women, their tobacco-pouches, their lockets of women's hair, all the poor paltry things they valued once—tied up with the pay-book, hung round the neck, tied to the string of the metal disc. Those letters—those cold lifeless bodies . . . And he the master of their obsequies !
The rain drove in gusts. How the wind keened There was an occasional rifle-shot. Figures moved in the gloom.
Who are you ? ' Kamerad ! Burial-party ! ' They, too, creeping like jackals among the slain 1 Clink of the spades. Come on ! Heave in this one ! Heavy, ain't he ? . . . Cover him up ! ' " or the following account of an advance :- " Orde's whistle blow. Adrian saw his lean figure on the skyline—and himself and everybody else clambered on to the parapet. But he found ho could not run. He could only flounder and stumble forward through the mud. Ho had to leap trenches. He had to extricate himself from loose strands of barbed wire which snared him by the puttees. . . . Every other moment somebody was hit. It- was like shooting down animals. Every other moment ho heard some half-strangled shout or whimpering cry which told of a man killed or wounded. Two or three soldiers lay propped, half-conscious, against sandbags, looking like stuffed figures. One near him lay stretched out motionless. . . . It was the second line of German trenches— and still no sign of a living German. In front of them the ground had been blown into a mound some forty feet high by • the action of heavy explosive shells. The soil had been hollowed out and scarred and rent into a great cavity which provided a last shelter for many—a pit of horror indescribable. Hero all the refuse, all the material of the neighbouring trenches, seemed to have fallen. Many German dead lay here, grey and bloody among the upturned earth. By itself lay the body of a British soldier, the face covered with a piece of white tarpaulin."
Is it not impossible to believe that for four years a. civilized world was entirely taken up with scenes so terrible ?
The sections of the book that are not concerned with the War are not so good. They deal with a set of people christened by Mr. Stephen McKenna " The Sensationalists," the descriptions of whose doings that writer has made peculiarly his own and elaborated till he has thoroughly wearied the novel-reading public. Mr. Ewart, with his faculty for vivid and realistic description, should not waste his time over a photograph of what is, after all, a very small and unimportant development of the social world. After such an ebullition of barbarism as a war involving the whole of Europe for over four years, it is only to be expected that all the evil seeds which in normal time people hide below the surface of society should germinate and throw up long rank shoots of poisonous vegetation. But perhaps Mr. Ewart's object in dwelling on the horrors at home is the same which makes him dwell with so dreadful an insistence on the horrors overseas. It may be that he wishes to show a world poisoned in every part by the noxious vapours of war, so that the nations, before resorting again to such a struggle, may pause and take warning. Such a consummation, though devoutly to be wished, does not seem likely to those who
study the lessons of history.
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