From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917. By Philip Gibbs. (W. Heinemann.
Os. net.)/tlany people will be glad to have this reprint of the letters which Mr. Gibbs, as the Daily Chronicle's war correspondent, sent from the front last year, describing the enemy's retreat from the Somme and the battles of Arras, Messines, and Flanders. Mr. Gibbs has always fixed his gaze on the human— and inhuman—elements in war, and tries to tell his many readers how the common man thinks and feels amid the awful scenes of a modern battlefield. His book has thus, we think, a permanent value as a record of personal impressions, vividly and often elo- quently expressed. In the fog of war it is hard to describe military movements with any approach to accuracy, and the shrewdest military critics may be wrong in their judgments formed from day to day. 'But Mr. Gibbs's personal narrative, in which the purely military aspects of the struggle are subordinated to the individual combatant's feelings and experiences, stands apart from the ordinary war chroniclee,-and its freshness is unimpaired by the lapse of time In the reprinted articles Mr. Gibbs has been allowed to name the battalions whose prowess he describes. He adds a spirited Intro- duction and a few maps.
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