ive for them
many an old and joyful memory of the days that are gone. Mr. AINGER
discourses, with a _mitis sapientia_ that is very attractive, on the
fashions and manners of the past and the gradual process of their
development into the Eton of the present. He is proud, as every good
Etonian must be, of Eton as it exists, but now and again he hints that
the Eton of an older time was in some respects a simpler and a better
place. The mood, however, never lasts long, and no one can quarrel
with the way in which it is expressed. General LYTTELTON, too, in one
of his contributions, relates how on his return from a long stay in
India he visited Eton, expecting to be modestly welcomed by shy and
ingenuous youths, and how, instead, he was received and patronised by
young but sophisticated men of the world. The GENERAL, I gather,
was somewhat chilled by his experience. Altogether this book is
emphatically one without which no Etonian's library can be considered
complete.

* * * * *

Perhaps of all our War correspondents Mr. PHILIP GIBBS contrives
to give in his despatches the liveliest sense of the movement, the
pageantry and the abominable horror of war. Pageantry there is, for
all the evil boredom and weariness of this pit-and-ditch business,
and Mr. GIBBS sees finely and has an honest pen that avoids the easy
_cliche_. You might truthfully describe his book, _The Battles of the
Somme_ (HEINEMANN), as an epic of the New Armies. He never seems to
lose his wonder at their courage and their spirit, and always with an
undercurrent of sincerely modest apology for his own presence there
with his notebook, a mere chronicler of others' gallantry. This
chronicle begins at the glorious 1st of July and ends just before
Beaumont-Hamel, which the author miserably missed, being sent home on
sick leave. It is a book that may well be one of those preserved and
read a generation hence by men who want to know what the great War
was really like. God knows it ought to help them to do something to
prevent another. Yet there is nothing morbid in it. As the sergeant
thigh-deep in a flooded trench said, "You know, Sir, it doesn't do
to take this war seriously." The armies of a nation that takes its
pleasures sadly take their bitter pains with a grin; and that grin
is what has made them such an unexpectedly tough proposition to the
All-Seriousest.

* * * * *

An old adage warns us ne