tual
functions of poetry and good literature. It is also unique in that it
contains a story of love, a motive largely absent from Mr. Belloc's
imaginative writing.

In so far as it is an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and
we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the
age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an
unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary
decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and
malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The
progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero
is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the party which bore
that name.

The action moves from a town in the Gironde to the frontiers. The hero
is killed by an accident with a gun-team soon after the Battle of Valmy.
That is the unfamiliar aspect of the hackneyed French Revolution with
which Mr. Belloc here chooses to deal: an aspect, we might even say, not
merely unfamiliar, but practically unknown to the English reader.

The matter of raising the armies was a matter of prime importance to the
Republic, and involved a task which even we, in this country, with all
our recent experiences, can hardly comprehend. The officers had
deserted, the men were not all to be trusted, all told there were not
enough for the pressing necessities of the State. A corps of officers
had to be improvised from nowhere, recruits had to be taught to ride as
they went to meet the Prussians. Such were the beginnings of the army
that afterwards visited the Pyramids, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow.

All this Mr. Belloc has shown with sufficient vividness in isolated
passages. Even those who have played no part in the raising of the new
armies of England, can gain from his descriptions something of what that
business must have been. But in this book he is not merely writing a
sketch to visualize the past, he is writing a real story with a number
of living characters and a sort of a plot. And in some way the story and
the historical matter weaken one another. They go and come by turns. The
whole book is an irregular succession of detached incidents. The witty
Boutroux is a sport of chance and dies, fitly enough, not in action, but
by a mishap.

If we separate from the rest the incident of the girl Joyeuse, it is
extremely beautiful. Take by themselves the stratagems and the
conversations of Boutroux