FICTION.
CORPORAL'S CORNER.t
THE letters of which this little book are made up .purport to have been written by a corporal, an ex-schoolmaster, an incurable " spinal case " in a military hospital, to a nurse formerly attached to the staff. They reveal a type by no means unfamiliar in the New Armies. As Maurice Jack puts it he was not a real soldier. But the British Tommy is not Kipling's Mr. Thomas Atkins any more. " He is a clerk, or a schoolmaster, or a collier or a churchwarden or a farmer, thrust by desperate accident into a soldier's uniform. So when we come home we forget our past very quickly, and we do not talk of the old nightmare except to each other." Yet he was glad to have been there,; though it has ended in a mattress grave. He had been among the gods, and his wish for real life was granted. " It is fine to know that we are something greater than the knights of old, we clean-shaven, smooth-haired sons of the pen and the desk and the countinghouse." But he remains the onlooker throughout, though his subjects are mostly confined to nurses and the men in blue, above all his comrade Mackenzie, a perfectly delightful specimen of the " Jock." His letters are the outpourings of a full mind, and are built up of autobiographical reminiscences, of talk • The Field of Boez. By Ruth Bryan. Edited by F. C. SNIT, Minister et Regent's Park Chapel. With Biographical Note by T. A. Lacey. London: The Society of SS. Peter and Paul. its.! t Corporal's Corner. Edited by W. DI. Letts. London : Wens Gardner, Barton and Co, [29, 6d. 110;.1
on his favourite books and early literary loves ; of dream cities ; of speculation on Heaven and Purgatory, Resurrection and Reincarnation. The tragedy of his situation is enhanced by his love of beauty and strength and health. Yet he remains tolerant and cheerful even in the midSlough of Despond, and when unable to see light for himself is always active in dispelling the gloom of others. Jack makes no pretence to a Stoical Philosophy, but he is a living example of fortitude. The daily routine of hospital life furnishes him with endless material for acute but sympathetic comment. He proves the good genius of his comrade " Mac " in the tragicomedy of his courtship and lives to rejoice at "Mac's " happiness. He reads his nurses like a book, and is as quick to make allowance for the nagging sister as he is to recognize the graces of the ministering angel. When his correspondent's betrothed is killed in action he is her chief consoler, out of the wealth of his reading and the contrasted experience of his own life. We are reminded of a beautiful saying of Mr. Bain's in An Echo of the Spheres : " No matter to what depths of, necessity my mother was reduced, she always had, by some strange necromancy, something to give away." His religion is best summed up in the last verse of Baxter's famous hymn : " Our knowledge of that life is small ; The eye of faith is dim ; It is enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with him.".
So in his last letter to his friend, on the eve of her departure for Salonika and only a few days before his death, he writes : " I believe that our Captain, the beloved Captain, will never rest satisfied till all His troops are safe. ' Lord, I believe, help Thou Mine unbelief.' What a magnificent paradox of faith ! "
Whether these are the genuine letters of a soldier patient or not matters little. It is enough that they could only have been written by one who has seen and endured much, who has been " smitten to the Place of Dragons," and has for the rest an intimate knowledge of humanity as revealed in the daily work of a military hospital during the war. As Corporal Jack says of the Morte d'Arthur, this book is at once sad, gay and human. Miss Letts once wrote a charming novel called The Rough Way ; here, too, the road trodden is rough and bleak, but it is per aspera ad antra and made bearable by companionship. There are many beautiful and memorable things in these pages, and few of those who have suffered from the war will read it without comfort. Many wonderful tributes to the heroic dead are on record ; few are more moving than those given on page 53 Thank you for allowing me to see the letters about Captain Faulkner. . . . I like the Padre's and his soldier servant's best—' he was our brother in the trenches '—that's fine, and the Chaplain's—' he made one feel there must be a God, if only to have made such a man.' " Loose Ends. By Arnold Lunn. (Hutchinson and Co. 6s. 9d. net.)—This is a Public School story, and Mr. Lunn does not spare his readers any of the more repulsive sides of Public School life. The story does not always succeed in carrying on the reader who does not happen to be at a Public School, and its infinity of small details is occasionally rather tedious. The portrait of Mr. Quirk—the literature and history master—who tries the original plan:of making his classes interesting to the boys and is worsted in the struggle, is well drawn, but Mr. Lunn fails to make the boy who is the central figure in the story Jiving figure.
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