BLACK GALLANTRY. By Val Gielgud. (Constable. 7s. 6d.) We are
delayed for some considerable time (to be precise ninety-three pages) before we reach the living run of this story, but once we get there it is with a vengeance, and blood, desperate fighting, thrills of breathless excitement and sadistic cruelty jostle each other for a place in the reader's attention. As is natural enough, the author. (himself sprung of an ancient Polish stock) lays the scene in Poland at a time when that country was being pressed hard by the Bolshevik armies. Ladislas Sale, the hero, an Anglo-Pole, feels the call of country and goes back to help it, and there meets his cousin Michael, a Russian Pole, who, operating from his ancestral castle, is the chief of a gang of military bandits. Michael has to wife Barbara, a beautiful English girl, whom he has previously ravished, and no hardened novel reader need be told of the result of the meeting of Ladislas and Barbara— a result made permanently poisible by the death of Michael. Though the plot of this first novel suffers at times from not very skilfully inserted interpolations, yet the writing is strong and vivid; and the book gives excellent promise of others, to come. The author might perhaps note that it is eyes which are damned and not expressions as on page 85.
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