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that Ended the War_, he fairly throws down the gauntlet. But take my advice
and don't be drawn. He has a foreword from General MILNE to support him,
and an extract from LUDENDORFF'S _Memoirs_, and a quotation from _The
Times_. He has a very lively and convincing way of putting things too, and
once he gets his enthusiasm fairly in hand becomes an uncommonly powerful
advocate. Not that this volume is by any means just a piece of special
pleading; only the author is honourably concerned to show both the
importance and the severity of the war against the Bulgars, which he thinks
people at home were a little inclined to disparage. I certainly cannot
remember doing so, but, putting controversy aside, this book remains an
adequate first-hand account of an adventure so great as to demand an heroic
literature all its own, where it can be seen in true perspective. Mr. OWEN
deals delightfully with nights in Salonika clubland or the vagaries of King
"TINO", or with the more warlike matters culminating in the terrific
actions that held the enemy's left wing tight while our allies smashed his
centre. An excellent book, with illustrations above the average and a good
map handily placed.

* * * * *

Mrs. HENRY DUDENEY'S _Spade Work_ (HURST AND BLACKETT) is a queer story
queerly told. A musician and an art-and-crafty girl, both poor and both
dull, are engaged. The musician, visiting his _fiancee_, now well off and
installed in a comfortable village farm-house, lets the strong air of the
place get into his head and falls deep in love with a yeoman's daughter,
who in turn, stimulated by this experience, straightway succumbs (at her
first dance in real society, into which the great lady of the village, her
patron, has introduced her) to the suggestion that she shall spend an
unchaperoned night on a young blood's yacht, with results usual in
distressful fiction. However, after many tribulations she and her musician,
now duller than ever, are united, while the jilted craftswoman is left
"full of ideas, sumptious (_sic_), a little feverish" for village
industries which from my impression of her mentality I should judge would
be of a devastating order. Lovers of that charming little West-country
village in which the author sets her scene will not easily forgive her for
naming it and baldly cataloguing its houses and sundry points of its
environment, leaving out most that is the essential of its charm.