10 JANUARY 1920, Page 21

My French Year. By Constance Elizabeth Maud. (Mills and Boon.

10s. 6d. net.)—Miss Maud went to France late in 1917 as a delegate of the Red Cross. She travelled far and saw much in the war zone, and she records her impressions in this interesting book. What she saw, and what she heard from Frenchwomen of their bitter experience at the hands of the invaders, will help English readers to understand why the French people are not so ready as our sentimentalists to let bygones be bygones. Even the French nurses were not exempt from insult, and worse, at the hands of the German army doctors. A nurse in Noyon told Miss Maud that she and her colleagues found it necessary to make a rule that no French nurse should go alone to an interview with a German doctor in the hospital. She said that only three out of the hundred German doctors whom she had met had known how to behave as gentlemen. The German nurses, she said, were just as bad. Facts like this, of which we have heard little in England, explain why Frenchmen look upon the Germans as creatures of a lower species. The book contains some instructive photographs of ruined towns.