measure of our
loss.

* * * * *

In his last grim and terrible work, _Realities of War_ (HEINEMANN), Sir
PHILIP GIBBS has fairly flung aside the restraint, enforced or
self-imposed, that marked his despatches from the fighting fronts, to
present war, the horrible, senseless nightmare, as it really appeared to
him. His work as a correspondent emphasised for him the accumulated
miseries of thousands rather than any individual's share, and his point of
view is as remorselessly gloomy as can be imagined. He is detailed in
disgust; he is passionate in pessimism. He presents not only the soldier's
distaste for trenches and machine guns, and his desire for the things of
familiar life, but also, with surprising vehemence, his hatred of generals
who give blundering orders from comfortable billets in the rear, or of
munitioners in England who keep optimistic in spite of bad news from the
Front. He does not pretend to be quite fair in his criticisms, for
obviously the higher command had to keep out of the firing-line and
somebody had to work--and hard too--to supply the torrent of munitions
demanded. Sir PHILIP admits all that, but in a kind of agony calls on God
and man to realise the meaningless horror of it all and forbid, at any
price, the possibility of its recurrence. If sometimes unjust and nearly
always tragical, the book none the less is free from anything like
hysteria.

* * * * *

Mr. WARD MUIR writes with one eye on the evening papers, and the very title
(not to mention the wrapper) of _Adventures in Marriage_ (SIMPKIN) lures us
without any sense of difficult transition from the news of the day to the
realms of romance. Fifteen stories are contained in this book, of rather
unequal length and merit, nearly all of them dealing with a tense situation
between husband and wife, several of them calculated to lift the hair, and
one or two sufficiently ingenious in mechanism, I should think, to raise a
curtain. The adventures are not all unhappy, and the author would seem on
the whole to balance the scales fairly evenly between those who desire to
reform the Divorce Law and those who would rather reform the world. With
the exception of the first the tales are all effectively told and, if the
machinery is fairly obvious, it does not click too much. The last on the
list is much lengthier than all the others, belonging to the classic
magazine school, which ransack