calm.

* * * * *

As was to be expected, one of the signs of the times in literature,
not of one country but of all, is a grim change in its attitude
towards war. The era of pomp and circumstance, as of genial
make-believe, is gone by; more and more are our writers beginning
to give us militarism stripped of romance, a grisly but (I suppose)
useful picture. I have nowhere found it more horrible than in a story
called _The Secret Battle_ (METHUEN), written by Mr. A.P. HERBERT,
whose initials are familiar to _Punch_ readers under work of a lighter
texture. This is an intimate study, inspired throughout by a cold fury
of purpose that can be felt on every page, of the destruction of a
young man's spirit in the insensate machinery of modern war. There
is no other plot, no side issues, no relief. From the introduction of
_Harry Penrose_, fresh from Oxford, embarking like a gallant gentleman
upon the adventure of arms, to the tragedy that blotted him out of
a scheme that had misused and ruined him, the record moves with a
dreadful singleness of intent. Sometimes, one at least hopes, the
shadows may have been artificially darkened. It seems even to-day
hardly credible that events should conspire to such futility of
error. But as a story with a purpose, not, in spite of the publisher's
description, a novel, _The Secret Battle_ certainly deserves the
epithet "striking." It is a blow from the shoulder.

* * * * *

The worst of quotations is that either their staleness is tedious or
their unfamiliarity irritates. Mr. S.G. TALLENTYRE has at least one,
generally of the latter sort, and oftener half-a-dozen, on every page
of _Love Laughs Last_ (BLACKWOOD), or, at any rate, that is one's
first impression of the book; while the second is that the number of
characters is not much less. It follows that in trying to identify
all the persons to whom he may or may not have been introduced in
the previous pages, and all the phrases in inverted commas he has
certainly seen somewhere else sometime, the truly diligent reader will
be kept faithfully at his task--a pleasant one possibly, but just a
thought too much like hard work to be quite entertaining in a novel.
Apart from all this and an occasional obscure sentence there is
nothing much to grumble at in a story that tells how _David_,
the sailor, unlearned in the ways of ladies, became engaged for
insufficient reasons to one