t a just cause, but see that it appears just
before men," he seems to say. "The surprise effect of gas (at Ypres) was
very great," is all the comment that tragic episode draws from him. He was
a submarine campaign whole-hogger. But he has his own soldierly virtues of
modesty and loyalty, and refuses to air his personal grievances in the
matter of his supersession by the HINDENBURG-LUDENDORFF syndicate. If, as
seems likely, he speaks the truth, as he had opportunity to see it, we must
revise our too flattering estimates of the German superiority in numbers
and attribute a good deal of the stubbornness of their defence to their
quicker appreciation of the character of siege war. The holding of
front-line trenches with few men and consequent immense saving of life was,
according to the General, practised by the German Command long before we
discovered its value. He gives a reasoned criticism, which has to the
layman a plausible air, to the effect that the relative failure of Joffre's
great combined Champagne-Flanders offensive of 1915 was due to the
overcrowding of the attacking armies. General VON FALKENHAYN, though he has
a prejudice for the German soldier, can bring himself to testify to the
valour of his British and French opponent. A readable and conscientious
account of a difficult stewardship.

* * * * *

I wish I could feel as enthusiastic about _The Booming of Bunkie_ (JENKINS)
as _Mr. Peter McMunn_, who, falling off a motor-cycle, landed in that quiet
Scots village and proceeded to turn it, by a series of stunts, into a
well-known watering-place. He undertook the job, I gather, partly for a
joke and partly for the bright eyes of _Evelyn Kirbet_, whose father put up
the money for the purposes of publicity and propaganda. The transformation
of a hamlet into a seaside resort has been treated as a sort of
psychological romance by Mr. OLIVER ONIONS in _Mushroom Town_, where the
human beings are a background as it were for the bricks and mortar; Mr.
A.S. NEILL, having chosen to make a farce of it, has provided a hero who
believes in humorous advertisements, and has evidently persuaded the author
to take him at his own valuation. This is hardly to be wondered at, since
_Mr. McMunn_ seems always keener on popping his puns than on selling his
goods. Specimens are given of speeches, press articles, posters and cinema
productions, but the fun rages with the most furious intensity round the
gol