ome sense be regarded as
a counterblast to the former volume, since its writer, Major ARDERN
BEAMAN, D.S.O., has admittedly intended it as a vindication of the
work of the cavalry in the Great War. I can say at once that the
defence could scarcely have found a better advocate. Major BEAMAN
(who, I think superfluously, figures in his own pages in the fictional
character of Padre) has written one of the most interesting records
that I have read of personal experience on the Western Front. Partly
this is explained by his fortunate possession of a style at once
sincere, sanely balanced and always engaging. Also his story, apart
from the matter of it, reveals in the men of whom he writes (and
incidentally in the writer himself) a combination of just those
qualities that we like to call essentially British. Cavalrymen of
course will read it with a special fervour; but I am mistaken if
its genial temper does not disarm even so difficult a critic as the
ex-infantry Lieutenant--than which I could hardly say more. In short,
_The Squadroon_ is a belated war book in which the most weary of such
matters may well recapture their interest.

***

Written in the last great ebb and flow of the War, when the censorship
still prevented anything like carping criticism of matters near
the battle-front, _The Glory of the Coming_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON)
naturally resolves itself into a paean of praise of the French and
British armies in general and the American troops in particular, both
white and black. Mr. IRVIN S. COBB brings good credentials to his
task, for he saw the advance of the German army through Belgium in
1914, and in this book he describes the combined resistance to their
last great effort before defeat. The accident, if we may so call it,
to the Fifth Army has had nowhere a more eloquent apologist. "They
were like ants; they were like flies," he says of the Germans; "they
left their dead lying so thickly behind that finally the ground seemed
as though it were covered with a grey carpet." There are interesting
strictures in the later chapters on some of the quaint semi-official
delegations and personages who persuaded the United States Government
to let them come over and visit the War; and there are a number of
quite good yarns of the Yankee private, related in the Yankee style.
But better than all the American stories I think I like that of the
Bedfordshire soldier who, when asked by the writer to direct him to
Blerinc