FICTION

THE TEDIUM OF WAR

Myrtle. By -Stephen Hudson. (Constable. 7s. 6c1. net.)

Mn. MorrnAm's novel, The Spanish Farm, won the Haw-

thornden Prize for a " work of imagination 7' in 1924. It was a respectable piece of work, well built and steady ; but it was surprising to see it judged imaginative. Sixty-four, Ninety-four ! is a still better novel ; and it is good in the same respectable way ; it is obviously composed from a sound memory and no heroisms or sentimentalities cuter to distort that memory. " There is no futile, impertinent pen-photo- graph of anyb3dy.” Mr. Mottram assures us ; and we could have seen for ourselves that the novel is not a mere transcript of fact ; the material is arranged and worked upon. All the same, its value is in its realism, not in any impulsiveness Or unification, not in any personal quality of the author's mind.

Yet it shows more than care ; it makes us suppose in Mr. Mottram some degree of awareness and appreciation. For, though it deals with the War, it is one man we see, and the War conies through his eyes. An astonishing and obviously true light is thrown on the psychology of the infantry officer let the Front Line. The War is happening around him it is his environment and his life. It includes him and he is given no chance to sec it from outside, no chance to follow fluctuations except as his own comfort is affected, his own friends are killed off. The incidents of war to him are the furnishing of his dug-out, the cooking of his batman, his. Paris leaves, the new jobs he is given. There are wider changes,-

but he quickly settles down to them ; he adapts himself to New Armies, to gas-shells, to Tanks. When he first came out he was indignant that the trenches were not better made and better looked after ; he prepared a long report on the improve- ments that could easily be carried out ; and it took the stoutest persuasion of his more experienced friends to dissuade him from sending it in. In the last year of the War there are no front-line trenches in the old sense at all ; patrols are holding shell-holes along the front. But he has learned to drop into new conditions without any bother. The War is no longer war ; it is his job. He no longer has enthusiasms or indignations : everything is routine. He is used to it all, he can scarcely conceive of another set of conditions. He has got beyond the time when the two prospects of relief were either that the War should end or that he should be killed. When he is at Lille in November, he hears that the War is over. He meets a fellow-officer in charge of a mule team.

" Is it true they've chucked it ? '

Skene nodded. ' I believe the Bosche are going to sign the Armistice terms in the morning ! ' ' Good job. We should have chucked it, if they hadn't ! '

And he stumped on.

Skene pulled off his boots and got into his blankets. ' Too long,' he thought. ' Who cares now ? ' "

The rectification of circumstances in the War, the adaptation to new conditions, was admirably displayed in the three arts of wangling, scrounging, and winning. Mr. Mottram has an interesting disquisition on these practices and dis- tinguishes them from each other precisely. The moralist and the sociologist might well consider the problems to individual conscience set during the War (and solved without scruple), and there seems to be room for a thesis upon " theft as an economical means for the distribution of supplies." It was an odd time, when the most upright of men looked with approbation on " barefaced cheating" and robbery" ;

and when it was actually true that the details of organization were often best solved by a, tolerance of misappropriation.

" The main stream of Scrounging was for wood. The armies were provided with coal and coke, and presumably intended to ignite it by holding a match to it. In result., millions of men during the five winters of the War burnt a colossal cubage of wood. It was easy to obtain. Vast quantities were being cut lay an entire Forestry Corps that had rights over several Picard and Norman forests and did nothing else but provide the timber required for dug-outs, railways, roads and gunpits. No great percentage ever reached its proper destination. A little was built into huts, horse- lines or billets. The bulk was burnt. From the timber dumps in the great cold of January, 1917, whole stacks disappeared. If any authority went into the matter, a dumb, putty-faced sentry was produced who had heard nothing, seen nothing, knew nothing. But even the enormous quantity taken from dumps was not enough. Farms, houses, public buildings were ransacked. Shelving, forms, ladders, carts, partitions disappeared. In the Belgian hop-fields the British Army alone is said to have destroyed 1,000,000 hop- poles. Who shall blame them ? Shall a soldier die of cold as well as of other things ? "

The title of the book comes from one of the mournful rhymes with which the Army is accustomed to keep itself

in good spirits :—

" Sixty-four, Ninety-lour, He'll never go sick no more,

The poor beggar's dead ! "

The novel is chiefly remarkable for the picture it gives of the ramshackle, unorthodox, semi-barbarian civilization which sprung up on the Western Front, the child of our own civilizaz tion and the elements.

Mr. Stephen Hudson has been working his way, by con-, scientiousness and a fine sensibility, towards a high reputation as a novelist. Myrtle will undoubtedly add to his fame. There is an Edwardian mannerliness and sweetness in it that gives a sober attractiveness to the writing. We are in doubt whether a nurse-maid would refer to the eyes " like buttercups and daisies " of the baby under her charge ; but perhaps she might have ddne before the War, and the small poeticisms through the book do not pull us up in irritation.

Nine characters give in succession an account of their reactions to the heroine. All of them adore her. There can hardly be a more persuasive way of engaging our sym- pathy ; for we are seeing her at the same tune externally and in her full radiance. With most modern novels we cannot escape a certain measure of sympathy with the chief

characters ; for theirs is the focus through which we see events, we dwell in their consciousnesses, and are unable to choose whether we shall agree with them or no—the only data for judgment come through them. But our sympathy will not be deep or alert unless in fact our minds have the same habits. Here in Mr. Hudson's novel we obtain, it seems to us, independent reactions. An unexpected result of his method is that we learn comparatively little of what Myrtle's intimate characteristics are ; in that way we have -stronger impressions of the nine admirers who tell the story. When we reassemble our dispersed judgments, we discover that Myrtle was beautiful, was charming, was sensitive, was capable of companionship—and what else ? She remains rather vague and unsubstantial, a heroine more than a person. We gather, perhaps, that her education had left her a little priggish, that her self-assurance was due to a coldness of nature, that she could never initiate intimacies or abandon herself to the dictates of her heart ; and we are

not quite sure that this is what Mr. Hudson wished us to understand.

Two —and One Over is half promise and half discouragement ; but as it is published in a " First Novel " Library the promise is far the more important. The excellences are almost all in the portrait of Caroline, a quiet, self-willed, sensible child of -eighteen. She is pitted against a sophisticated and egotistic society ; she has to fight with her own mother for the affection and regard of her husband, who thinks her no more than a beautiful child. Her unusual sense of fairness, her desire not to interfere with the self-will of others, render her struggle harder ; they make her reticent and outwardly simple, and as she had not begun her married life with any intimate understanding from her husband, he cannot be expected to see the integrity of love, the especial sanity, and the profundity of character behind her non-committal phrases : he has not yet the sympathy needed for intuition.

The discouragements are many. The plot itself is rigid and conventional. The conversations are stiffly and uncon- vincingly clever. There seems to be no ground of visualization for most of the characters ; they have no existence suggested outside the book. They are, indeed, of a most unlocalized society. But the most heart-breaking thing of all is their language. Half of them talk slang ; and slang disgraceful enough to set a bar-lounger's teeth on edge. We are satisfied, however, that their phraseology is a nightmare of Mrs. Hargraves' own invention, and that she is not genuinely familiar with the speech of young tennis-players or bourgeois bohemians. Otherwise she could not be so self-conscious in her use of it. The scene is set a year or two after the War ; and yet an almost irreproachable phrase, made classical by Dickens, is introduced with a kind of apology by implica- tion :—" ' I don't think ! ' he muttered, in the handy jargon of the moment."

OM. By Talbot Mundy. (Hutchinson. 7s. 6d. net.) The recalling to the mind of Mr. Kipling's Kim by the pub- lisher is a little unfortunate in connexion with this novel, for it is really uncommonly like Kim as it would have been seen through the eyes of a film producer. We are given the Lama, the Secret Government Service, and the Chela complete, though the Chela and the Government Agent are not, for reasons soon obvious to the reader, the same. How- ever, regarded as the film version of an Eastern story, the book is excellent reading, and the account of the night journey by the " Middle way " most picturesque with its trail of camels, elephants, &e., all lent by an obliging Rajah.

THE FACE IN THE NIGHT. By Edgar Wallace. (John Long. 7s. 6d. net.)

The opening of Mr. Wallace's new novel, though thrilling, cannot be said to be original. We have often before met the arch-criminal who sits in solitary grandeur and darkness con- trolling an army of crooks, who commit every conceivable crime. The book, however, is very exciting reading, and the adventures and escapes of the principal characters come thick and fast. But Mr. Wallace must guard against the danger of making the solution of his mysteries incredible. He gets uncommonly near this in the present instance. It is difficult, for instance, to swallow the arch-criminal's final—and very nearly fatal—device for averting suspicion.

THE AVALANCHE. By Ernest Poole. (Nash and Grayson. 7s. 6d. net.) Mr. Ernest Poole will add considerably to his reputation by this novel, which deals with the marriage between a New

York Society girl, Dorothea Farragut, and Llewellyn Dorr, a promising neurologist. Llewellyn is a semi-mystic and utterly unworldly, while Dorothea is of a very good

type of American. woman. Ambitious and energetic, she is disillusioned as to her social aspirations and longs to take a leading part in the- world. Llewellyn, on the other hand, treats his work as entirely apart from his conjugal life, and, though he depends on Dorothea's love, is extremely desirous that she should ceaseher efforts to afford him a worldly success. The two characters are so minutely and ably drawn that the foredoomed tragedy of the • marriage is almost too poignant. The book would be even better if we had a little less of the social game and a few more detaik of Llewellyn's work. All that Mr. Poole gives us of this is full of interest and whets our appetite for further details. The social part is much more commonplace.