he youth, early life and
courtship of _William_, who, with the girl whom he married, belonged
to the vehement circles of the Labour-Suffragist group, spending a
cheerfully ignorant life in a round of meetings, in hunger-striking
and whole-hearted support of the pacifism that "seeks peace and ensues
it by insisting firmly, and even to blood, that it is the other
side's duty to give way." One small concession you must make to
Miss HAMILTON'S plot. It is improbable that, when such a couple as
_William_ and _Griselda_ left England in July 1914 to take their
honeymoon in a remote valley of the Belgian Ardennes, their friends,
knowing them to be without news and ignorant of all speech save
English, should have made no effort to warn them. But, this granted,
the tragedy that follows becomes inevitable. It is so finely told and
so horrible (the more so for the deliberate restraint of the telling)
that I will say nothing to weaken its effect. From one scene, however,
I cannot withhold my tribute of admiration--that in which _William_,
alone, brokenhearted, and almost crazed with the ruin of everything
that made up his life, creeps home to find his old associates still
glibly echoing the platitudes in which he once believed. A hint here
of insincerity or conscious arrangement would have ruined all; as it
is, the scene holds and haunts one with an impression of absolute
truth, For the end, marked like all by an almost grim avoidance of
sentimentality, I shall only refer you to the book itself. After
reading it you will, I hope, not think me guilty of exaggeration when
I call it, slight though it is, one for which its author has deserved
well of the State.

* * * * *

The dominant impression left upon me by Miss MERIEL BUCHANAN'S
_Petrograd the City of Trouble_ (COLLINS) is that its author is a
sportswoman of the first order. You see her pressing to the windows to
observe the shooting in the streets, going out to shop, to dine, to
dance, during the stormy months of the various phases of the
various Russian Revolutions. And I hasten to add, for fear of
misunderstanding, that there is no suggestion of pose as the heroic
Englishwoman. It was not till the end of 1918 that Sir GEORGE BUCHANAN
withdrew from a country in which ambassadorial functions had obviously
no reasonable scope. But he and his family, including our chronicler,
his spirited daughter, remained long after there was any plausible
reason