f the British forces in Macedonia is
supposed to supply an answer to a not unnatural query as to what they
are doing there, I am afraid one must take it that in fact they are
doing nothing in particular. An intelligent British public believes
that at least they are immobilising important enemy forces and perhaps
accomplishing several other useful things as well, but the writer, who
has actually been _In Salonica with Our Army_ (MELROSE), frankly lays
aside high considerations of policy and, seeing it all in desperately
foreshortened perspective, knows only that he and his fellows,
having volunteered to fight, are being called on instead to endure
a purgatorial routine of dust and dulness, mosquitoes, malaria and
night marches, and the grilling away of useless days in the society of
flies and lizards, with only, as a very occasional treat, the smallest
glimpse of anything resembling a Front. And all this is in a country
so desolated by centuries of war that in spite of obvious natural
fertility it is a sullen treeless desert--a desert of blight and
thistles, as profitless to our men as their periodically deferred
anticipations of a grand advance. A book that sets out to record
vacuity can hardly be crammed with thrilling literature, and I am
not going to pretend that Mr. LAKE has achieved the impossible. All
the same one found points--for instance, his desire that someone
(apparently England for choice!) should colonise Macedonia; and his
most right and appropriate plea for fairer recognition of those who
have sacrificed their health in the national service. A man, he holds,
who is to suffer all his life from malarial fever has done his bit no
less than plenty who bear the honourable insignia of the wounded in
battle and the snout of a mosquito may be as valorously encountered as
the bayonet of a Hun. And so say all of us.

* * * * *

I can read Miss MARY WEBB'S studies of the peasant mind with great
pleasure, but at the same time I am doubtful whether she is as
successful in _Gone to Earth_ (CONSTABLE) as she was in her first
novel, _The Golden Arrow_. My difficulty--and I hope it will not be
yours--was to believe in the power of _Hazel Woodus_ to make very
dissimilar men lose their hearts and heads. That _Jack Reddin_, a
dare-devil farmer with love for any sort of a chase in his blood,
should pursue her to the bitter end is intelligible enough, but why
_Edward Marston_, a rather anaemic