ING
RATHER NICE ABOUT MR. THOMKINS-SMITH."

_He._ "YES--I THINK IT MUST BE HIS WIFE."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

_War and the Future_ (CASSELL), by Mr. H.G. WELLS, is not a sustained
thesis but just jets of comment and flashes of epigram about the War as he
has seen it on the French, Italian and British fronts, and has thought
about it in peaceful Essex. A characteristic opening chapter, "The Passing
of the Effigy," suggests that "the Kaiser is perhaps the last of that long
series of crowned and cloaked and semi-divine personages which has included
Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon the First--and Third. In the light of the
new time we see the emperor-god for the guy he is." Generalissimo JOFFRE,
on the other hand, he found to be a decent most capable man, without fuss
and flummery, doing a distasteful job of work singularly well. There is
some particularly interesting matter about aeroplane work, and the writer
betrays a keen distress lest the cavalry notions of the soldiers of the old
school should make them put their trust in the horsemen rather than the
airmen in the break-through. As for "tanks," he offers the alternative of
organised world control or a new warfare of mammoth landships, to which the
devastation of this War will be merely sketchy; but I doubt if he quite
makes his point here. And finally this swift-dreaming thinker proclaims a
vision which he has seen of a new world-wide interrelated republicanism
founded on a recognition of the over-lordship of God.... You put the book
down feeling you have had a long, desultory and intimate conversation with
a very interesting fellow-traveller.

* * * * *

Really, if Mr. ROBERT HICHENS continues his present spendthrift course,
whatever Board controls the consumption of paper will have to put him on
half rations. I believe that his literary health would benefit enormously
by such a regime. This was my first thought in contemplating the almost six
hundred pages of _In the Wilderness_ (METHUEN), and it persists,
strengthened now that I have turned the last, of them. Here is a direct and
moving tragedy of three lives, much of the appeal of which is lost in a fog
of superfluous words. Of its theme I will tell you only this, that it shows
the contrasting loves, material and physical, of two widely divergent types
of womanhood. Probably human nature, ra