In Action. By F. Britten Austin. (Thomas Nelson and Sons.
2s. net.)—There is nothing in Mr. Austin's sketches of the so-called glory and glamour of warfare; they are the more awful and impressive for being far different in tone from the customary headlines of a " late edition"; indeed, their horror is almost too intense for them to be recommended without discrimination. Here battle and murder and sudden death are presented in their worst, but, we can hardly doubt, their true aspects. Mr. Austin has a grim humour and a sense of drama which never fail him, whether in writing of the shriek and crash of shell, and of the dark hundreds of infantry spread wide over the summer fields, or of the more individual passions of a soldier under fire :—he feels within himself, and he makes us feel, the wonderful complexity of emotions which make or mar a man. Certain faults are evident in his work: there is an occasional lapse into ambiguity and even into bad grammar, and a danger of repetition and monotony, which may be due to the fact that many of the sketches are reprinted from journals. On the whole, however, he has treated with skill the difficult matters of physical pain and death and all the inglorious side of war, and has written a book which will be an intellectual relief to those who are weary of the exasperating heroics of modern journalism, but which should surely bear on its cover a label, " To be taken in small doses, never late at night."
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